Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton (22)

Wake. The springs in my bed have snapped and my mattress is so thin that a sprung spring is stabbing through the mattress into my coccyx. I’m leaving here. I must go. Bed is too small. House is too small. World is too big.

Can’t keep sharing a room with my brother, no matter how low cadet wages are at the paper.

After midnight. Moon through the open window. August sleeping in his bed. The rest of the house in darkness. Mum’s bedroom door is open. She sleeps in the library room now there are no more books in it. August got rid of them all in the Bracken Ridge Book Bonanza, which ended up running for six consecutive Saturdays, with August making a disappointing $550 from the whole endeavour. He shifted almost 10,000 books through Bracken Ridge’s Housing Commission sector, but, amid disappointing sales, eventually reached the philosophical plateau that suggested giving the majority of books away for free. It wouldn’t help Mum get back on her feet any quicker but it would increase the chances of Bracken Ridge teens being exposed to Hermann Hesse, John le Carré and The Three Reproductive Phases of Silverfish. Because of my brother, August, there are men down at the Bracken Ridge Tavern on Saturday afternoons now drinking beers over Superforms and betting cards while they discuss the psychological resonance of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

I walk down the hall, still in my boxer shorts and an old black Adidas T-shirt that I’ve been wearing to bed, thin and comfortable and full of holes eaten away by what I believe might be silverfish, who survive on diets of Adidas T-shirts and books by Joseph Conrad.

I pull the fading cream curtain back on our wide front living room window. Open the window right up. Lean out and breathe the night air in deep. Look up at that full moon. Look out at the empty street. I see Lyle back in Darra. He’s standing in that suburban night in his roo-shooting coat smoking a Winfield Red. I miss him. I gave up on him because I was scared. Because I was gutless. Because I was angry at him. Fuck him, right. His fault for hopping in bed with Tytus Broz. Not my fault. Cut him out of my mind along with the Lord of Limbs. Cut them off like the ibis cut its own leg off because the fishing line was killing it.

It’s the moon that pulls my legs outside. My legs are moving and my mind follows. Then my mind follows my hands to the green garden hose looped around the tap fixed to the front of the house. I turn the hose on and kink the hose in my right hand so the water won’t spill through the orange nozzle. I drag the hose to the gutter by the letterbox. I sit and stare up at the moon. The full moon and me and the geometry between us. I release the kink and the water rushes onto the bitumen, pooling quickly in a flat pan in the street. The water runs and the silver moon wobbles in the forming puddle.

‘Can’t sleep?’

I forgot how much he sounds like me. It’s like he’s me and I’m standing behind myself. I look behind me to see August. His face lit by the moon, rubbing his eyes.

‘Yeah,’ I say.

We look into the moon pool.

‘I think I’ve got Dad’s worry gene,’ I say.

‘You don’t have his worry gene,’ he says.

‘I’m going to have to live my life as a recluse,’ I say. ‘I’m never gonna go outside. I’m gonna rent a Housing Commission home just like this one and fill two of the rooms with tinned Black and Gold spaghetti and I’ll eat spaghetti and read books until I die choking in my sleep on a ball of lint from my belly button.’

‘What is for you will not pass you by,’ August says.

I smile at him.

‘You know, I think you might have a baritone in that voice you never use,’ I say.

He laughs.

‘You should try singing some time,’ I say.

‘I think talking’s enough for now,’ he says.

‘I like talking to you, Gus.’

‘I like talking to you, Eli.’

He sits down in the gutter beside me, studies the hose water rushing into the moon pool.

‘What are you worrying about?’ he asks.

‘Everything,’ I say. ‘Everything that’s been and everything that’s about to be.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘It all gets—’

I cut him off. ‘Yeah, it all gets good, Gus, I know. Thanks for reminding me,’ I say.

Our reflections morph and disfigure like monsters in the moon pool.

‘Why do I have this feeling that tomorrow is going to be the most significant day of my life?’ I ponder.

‘Your feelings are well founded,’ August says. ‘It is going to be the most significant day of your life. Every day of your life has been leading up to tomorrow. But of course every day of your life led up to today.’

I look deeper into the moon pool, leaning over my hairy and thin legs.

‘I feel like I have no say in things any more,’ I say. ‘Like nothing I do can change what is and what is going to be. I’m in that car in the dream and we’re crashing through the trees towards that dam and there’s nothing I can do to change our fate. I can’t get out of the car, I can’t stop the car, I just go up and then I go down into the pool. And then all that water comes in.’

August nods at the moon pool.

‘Is that what you see in there?’ August asks.

I shake my head.

‘I don’t see nothin’.’

August looks deeper, too, into the growing moon pool.

‘What do you see?’ I ask.

He stands in his pyjamas. Woolworths cotton ones for summer. White with red stripes, like the nightwear for a member of a barber shop quartet.

‘I can see tomorrow,’ he says.

‘What do you see tomorrow?’ I ask.

‘Everything,’ he says.

‘You care to be a little more specific?’ I say.

He looks at me, puzzled.

‘I mean, it’s awfully convenient for you to maintain your sense of idiotic mystery with all these general comments relating to your bullshit conversations with your multiple selves from multiple dimensions,’ I say. ‘How come they never told you anything useful, these red phone selves of yours? Like, who’s gonna win the Melbourne Cup next year? Gold Lotto numbers next week, maybe? Or, oh, I don’t know, whether or not Tytus Broz is gonna fuckin’ recognise me tomorrow?’

‘Did you speak to the police?’

‘I called them,’ I say. ‘I asked a constable to put me onto the lead investigator. He wouldn’t do that without me giving my name first.’

‘You didn’t give him your name, did you?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I told the constable they need to investigate a man named Iwan Krol in relation to the Penn family. I asked the constable to write that name down. I said, “Are you writing this down?”, and he said he wasn’t because he first wanted to know who I was and why I didn’t want to give him my name and I said I didn’t want to give my name because Iwan Krol is dangerous and so is his boss. And the constable asked who Iwan Krol’s boss is and I said his boss is Tytus Broz and the constable said, “What, the charity guy?”, and I said, “Yeah, the fuckin’ charity guy.” And he said I was crazy and I said I’m not fuckin’ crazy, it’s this fuckin’ State of Queensland that’s fuckin’ crazy and you’re fuckin’ crazy if you don’t listen to me when I tell you that the llama hair the forensic science unit found in the Penns’ house belongs to Iwan Krol who has been running a llama farm on the outskirts of Dayboro for the past two decades.’

‘Then the constable wanted to know how you knew about the llama hair?’

I nod.

‘So I hung up.’

‘No skin off their nose,’ August says.

‘Huh?’

‘What do they care if the criminals of Queensland are slowly picking themselves off?’

‘I think they have to care when one of the people who has gone missing is an eight-year-old boy.’

August shrugs, looks deeper into the moon pool.

‘Bevan Penn,’ I say. ‘They pixelated his face in all the photos but, I swear, Gus, he’s us. He’s you and me.’

‘What do you mean, he’s you and me?’

‘I mean, that coulda been us. I mean, his mum and dad look like Mum and Lyle looked when I was eight years old, you know. And I been thinkin’ how Slim used to talk about cycles and time and things always coming back around again.’

‘They do,’ August says.

‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘maybe they do.’

‘Just like we come back,’ he says.

‘I don’t mean like that.’

I stand up.

‘Stop it, Gus,’ I say.

‘Stop what?’

‘Stop that bullshit about coming back. I’m sick of hearing it.’

‘But you came back, Eli,’ he says. ‘You always come back.’

‘I didn’t come back, Gus,’ I say. ‘I don’t come back. I’m just fuckin’ here in the one dimension. And those voices you heard on the end of the phone were the voices in your head.’

He shakes his head.

‘You heard them,’ he says. ‘You heard them.’

‘Yeah, I heard the voices in my head too,’ I say. ‘The batshit crazy voices in the heads of the Bell brothers. Yeah, Gus, I heard ’em.’

He stares into the moon pool.

‘Do you see her?’ he asks.

‘See who?’

He nods at the water.

‘Caitlyn Spies,’ August says.

‘What about Caitlyn?’ I ask, looking into the moon pool, following his gaze, finding nothing.

‘You should tell Caitlyn Spies.’

‘Tell her what?’

He looks into the pool. He taps the puddle of water with his bare right foot and the moon pool ripples into ten separate stories.

‘Tell her everything,’ he says.

Mum’s voice from the front window of the house. She’s trying to scream and whisper at the same time.

‘What the hell are you two doing out there with that hose?’ she hollers. ‘Get back in bed.’ Her stern warning voice now. ‘If you’re tired for tomorrow . . .’

Mum’s stern warnings are always open-ended, always leaving the possible consequences of waking up tired for tomorrow as intimidatingly infinite.

If you’re tired for tomorrow . . . I’ll beat your backsides so red you’ll put Rudolph out of work. If you’re tired for tomorrow . . . the stars will disappear from the night skies over Bracken Ridge. If you’re tired for tomorrow . . . the moon will crack like a gobstopper between your teeth and the colours inside the moon will blind humanity. Sleep, Eli. Tomorrow is coming. Everything is coming. All of your life is leading up to tomorrow.

*

Dad reads The Courier-Mail at the kitchen table at breakfast. He’s smoking a roll-your-own and reading the World Affairs pages. I can read the paper’s front page over my Weet-Bix bowl. It’s an enlarged picture of Glenn Penn’s prison photograph. He’s got a menacing and hard face. Blond hair in a crew cut, bent and misshapen teeth like a row of old garage doors opening halfway. Acne scars. Pale blue eyes. He gives a half-dumb half-smile in the photograph as though that prison photo was a rite of passage to be ticked off his list of dreams, like making it all the way with a pretty girl and making it all the way to Turkey with ten condoms full of heroin in his stomach and up his arse.

The picture’s accompanying story is a co-byline piece by Dave Cullen and Caitlyn Spies about Glenn Penn’s neglected and misspent youth. The usual story: Dad whips Mum with the cord from an electric fry pan; Mum spreads rat poison through Dad’s toasted ham, cheese and tomato sandwich; eight-year-old Glenn Penn burns his local post office down. Dave Cullen holds the top byline but I know Caitlyn wrote this. I know this because there’s a compassion in the piece and it doesn’t feature Dave Cullen’s regular go-to impact phrases ‘shocking revelation’, ‘murderous intent’ and ‘digitally penetrated’. Caitlyn’s interviewed several teachers and parents at Bevan Penn’s primary school. They all say he’s a good kid. A good boy. Quiet. Never hurt a fly. Reads a lot. A library geek. She’s telling the full story about the boy in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt with the face made of pixels.

‘What are you wearing tonight, Eli?’ Mum asks from the living room.

Mum’s ironing clothes with Dad’s old, faulty Sunbeam iron that sends electric shocks through the user on the ‘linen’ setting and leaves black tar marks on my work shirts if I turn it up any higher than the ‘synthetic’ setting.

It’s 8 a.m. – almost ten hours before August is due to accept his award in the Brisbane City Hall Queensland Champions ceremony – and Mum’s already buzzing around the living room the way Mr Bojangles buzzed around a drunk tank.

‘I’m just wearing this,’ I say, nodding down to my untucked plaid deep purple and white work shirt and blue jeans.

Mum is mortified.

‘Your big brother is going to be named a Queensland Champion and you’re gonna front up looking like a child molesterer.’

‘Molester, Mum.’

‘Huh?’ she says.

‘Child molester. Not child molesterer. And what exactly is it about what I’m wearing that makes me look like a child molester?’

She studies me for a moment.

‘It’s the shirt,’ she says. ‘The jeans, the shoes. The whole thing just screams, “Run, Joey.”’

I shake my head, dumbfounded, swallow my last spoonful of Weet-Bix.

‘Do you have time to come home and change before we go in?’ she asks.

‘Mum, I’ve got an important interview at 3 p.m. in Bellbowrie and a story I’ve gotta file by 6 p.m. back in Bowen Hills,’ I say. ‘I don’t have time to come home and change into a tuxedo for Gus’s big glory night.’

‘Don’t you dare be cynical about this moment,’ Mum says. ‘Don’t you dare, Eli.’

Mum’s pointing at me with a pair of her slacks under her arms ready for ironing. ‘This is the best day . . . of . . .’ Her eyes fill with tears. She drops her head. ‘This is a . . . great . . . fucking . . . day,’ she sobs.

Something deep in that face. Something primal. Dad puts the paper down on the table. He looks confused, lost for comfort solutions to the unexpected display of that unsettling womanly eye wetness known in more human circles as tears. I move to her. I hug her. ‘I’m gonna wear a nice jacket, Mum, all right,’ I say.

‘You don’t own a nice jacket,’ Mum says.

‘I’ll grab one of the work ones they have on the emergency rack.’

The shared emergency rack of hanging black coats for parliament and the magistrates court that all smell like whisky and cigarettes.

‘You’re gonna be there, right, Eli?’ Mum says. ‘You’re gonna be there tonight?’

‘I’m gonna be there, Mum,’ I say. ‘And I won’t be cynical, Mum.’

‘You promise?’

‘Yeah, I promise.’

I hug her tight.

‘This is a great day, Mum. I know it is.’

This is a great fucking day.

*

Judith Campese is the public relations woman from Queensland Champions. She’s been helping me all week with the feature spread I’m writing for tomorrow’s newspaper about ten winners from tonight’s glittery gathering in Brisbane City Hall.

She phones me at my work desk at 2.15 p.m.

‘Why are you still at your desk?’ she asks.

‘I’m just filing Bree Dower,’ I say. Bree Dower is the mother of six who ran around Ayers Rock 1788 times in 1988 to celebrate Australia’s bicentenary and raise money for the Queensland Girl Guides. Not the greatest twenty centimetres I’ll ever write. My story begins with the hamfisted introductory line, ‘Bree Dower’s life was going around in circles’ and I stretch the long bow of this entry point about how she quit her dead-end job as a real estate agency secretary all the way to how she found her purpose in life going around in circles at Uluru.

‘You better get a hurry on,’ Judith Campese says. She has a royal British undercurrent to her voice, sort of Princess Diana if Princess Diana managed a Fosseys fashion store.

‘Thanks for the advice,’ I say.

‘Just a quickie,’ she says. ‘Can you give me an idea of the questions you plan on asking Mr Broz?’

‘It’s not really policy for us to flag questions before interviews.’

‘Just ballpark?’ she sighs.

Well, I figure I’ll open with the gentle ice-breaker, ‘What did you do with Lyle, you twisted old cunt?’, then move seamlessly to, ‘Where’s my fucking finger, you animal?’

‘Ballpark?’ I say. ‘Who are you? What do you do? Where? When?’

‘Why?’ she says.

‘How’d you guess?’

‘Oh, that’s good,’ she says. ‘He really has a lot to say about why he does the things he does. It’s kinda inspirational.’

‘Well, Judith, I look forward to hearing about why he does the things he does.’

Across the newsroom, I can see Brian Robertson marching my way, staring at me as he approaches, so filled with steam his head needs a blast pipe.

‘I gotta go, Judith,’ I say, hanging up the phone and returning to the Bree Dower piece.

‘Bell,’ Brian barks from thirty metres away. ‘Where’s the Tytus Broz copy?’

‘I’m just going out there now.’

‘Don’t fuck it up, all right,’ he says. ‘The ad reps say he might come on board with some serious ad money. Why are you still at your desk?’

‘I’m filing the Bree Dower story.’

‘She the Uluru nutter?’

I nod. He reads the piece over my shoulder and my heart stops momentarily.

‘Ha!’ he smiles. I realise I’ve never seen his teeth before this moment. ‘“Bree Dower’s life was going around in circles.”’ He pats me on the back with his thick, heavy left hand. ‘Rolled gold, Bell. Rolled gold.’

‘Brian?’ I say.

‘Yeah?’ he says.

‘There’s a real big story on Tytus Broz I think I can write for you.’

‘Great, kid!’ he says, enthusiastic.

‘But it’s not an easy story for me to—’

I’m cut off by Dave Cullen calling across the room from the crime desk.

‘Boss, just got a quote from the Commissioner . . .’ Cullen hollers.

Brian rushes off. ‘We’ll talk when you’re back, Bell,’ he says, distracted. ‘File Broz a-sap.’

*

Waiting for a taxi to Bellbowrie. It’s forty minutes away in the outer western suburbs. I’ve got to be there in thirty minutes. I stare at my reflection in the glass entrance to our building. Me standing here in the floppy oversized black coat I yanked from the newsroom’s spare coat rack. Hands in deep coat pockets. Do I look that different as an eighteen-year-old from how I looked at thirteen? Longer hair. That’s about it. Same skinny arms and legs. Same nervous smile. He’s going to recognise me instantly. He’s going to spot my missing finger and he’s going to whistle a secret whistle that only dogs and Iwan Krol are attuned to and Iwan Krol will drag me out to a work shed behind Tytus Broz’s Bellbowrie mansion and there he will slice off my head with his knife and my head will still function severed from my body and I will be able to answer him when he scratches his chin and asks me, ‘Why, Eli Bell, why?’ And I will answer like I’m Kurt Vonnegut. ‘Tiger got to hunt, Iwan Krol. Bird got to fly. Eli Bell got to sit and wonder why, why, why?’

A small red Ford Meteor sedan screeches to a loud stop in front of me.

Caitlyn Spies pushes open the passenger-side door.

‘Get in,’ she barks.

‘Why?’ I ask.

‘Just get in the car, Eli Bell!’ she says.

I slip into the passenger seat. Close the door. She slams on the accelerator and I fall back in the seat as we speed into traffic.

‘Iwan Krol,’ she says, her right hand on the steering wheel, her left hand passing me a manila folder holding a slab of photocopied papers sitting beneath a police mugshot of Iwan Krol.

She turns to me and the sun lights up her hair and her face through the driver’s-side window and her perfect green eyes dig deep into my own.

‘Tell me everything.’

*

The Ford Meteor speeds down a Bellbowrie back road that snakes through cluttered bushland growth of old widowmaker eucalypts and suffocating lantana bushes that have knitted together across kilometres of scrub.

A street sign ahead.

‘Cork Lane,’ I say. ‘This is it.’

Cork Lane is a dirt road with large wheel divots and rocks the size of tennis balls that cause Caitlyn’s ill-suited car to bounce us up and down in our seats.

I had twenty-seven minutes to tell Caitlyn everything. She has saved her questions to the end.

‘So Lyle gets dragged away and just vanishes off the face of the earth?’ she says, her hands working hard on the steering wheel, struggling to keep the car moving straight.

I nod.

‘That fits the file,’ Caitlyn says, nodding at the folder in my hands. ‘I heard you talkin’ to Dave. I wrote down that name you said. Iwan Krol. There are only four registered llama farmers or llama pet owners currently living in the greater south-east Queensland region, your man Iwan Krol being one of them. So I called the other three and asked ’em straight up to tell me where they were on 16 May, right, the day the cops suspect the Penn family went missing. They all had perfectly believable and boring accounts of where they were. So then I go down to Fortitude Valley police station and I ask an old school friend of mine, Tim Cotton, who’s now a constable in the Valley, to dig me up anything they have on file on Iwan Krol and he passes me a brick of papers and I go to photocopy them and as I’m photocopying all these papers I’m reading all these statements from police where they’ve gone to Iwan Krol’s property in Dayboro on five separate occasions – five bloody times – across the past twenty years on cases of missing persons known or connected to Iwan Krol. And five times nothing sticks. Then, last night, I drop the file back to Tim Cotton and I’m buying him a meatball pizza down at Lucky’s in the Valley to thank him for his help and he pauses for a moment between trying to get in my pants and you know what he says?’

‘What?’

She shakes her head.

‘He says, “You might want to let this one go to the keeper, Caitlyn.”’

She slaps the steering wheel hard.

‘I mean, he actually fucking voices that shit, a fucking police officer, Eli? An eight-year-old kid’s gone missing and he says, “Let this one go to the keeper.” This is exactly why I fucking hate cricket!’

The car stops at an imposing white iron security gate built into a tall clay-coloured concrete security wall. Caitlyn winds her window down then reaches her arm out to a red intercom buzzer.

‘Hello,’ says a gentle voice.

‘Hi, Courier-Mail here for the interview with Mr Broz,’ Caitlyn says.

‘Welcome,’ says the gentle voice.

The gate slides open with a clunk.

Tytus Broz’s house is white like his suits and his hair and his hands. It’s a sprawling white concrete mansion with towering columns and Juliet balconies and a white wood double-door entry big enough to fit a white yacht through at full white mast. It’s more New Orleans bayou plantation mansion than Bellbowrie millionaire’s hideaway.

Dappled sunlight twinkles through the leaves of eight flourishing elm trees that line the long and twisting driveway that splits a vast manicured lawn and eventually ends at a wide set of white polished marble steps.

Caitlyn parks the car at a yellow gravel visitor’s bay left of the marble steps, slips out of the car and pops the car boot.

The sound of birds in the elm trees, a light wind. Nothing else.

‘How am I gonna explain who you are?’ I whisper.

Caitlyn reaches into the boot and presents an old black Canon camera, a long hard grey lens, like one of the cameras our sports photographers use in Lang Park on game days.

‘I’m the snapper,’ she smiles, closing one eye to gaze through the lens.

‘You’re not a photographer.’

‘Puh!’ she sniggers. ‘Point and click.’

‘Where’d you get that camera?’

‘Snuck it out of the repairs cabinet.’

She walks to the towering entry door.

‘C’mon,’ she says. ‘You’re late for your interview.’

*

Ring the doorbell. The doorbell rings in three places within the sprawling house, one ring echoing into another like a small music piece. Heart full of hope. Heart in my throat. Caitlyn grips her camera like it’s a war hammer and she’s leading a group of drunk Scots into battle. No more sound but the birds in the elm trees.

So far from anything here. So far from life and the world. I realise now how much the house doesn’t fit the setting. The white towering columns don’t fit with the native landscape surrounding us. There’s something wrong, something off about this place.

One half of the wide double-door entry swings open. As it swings open I remember to slip my right hand with its missing forefinger inside my deep right coat pocket, slip it out of view.

A short woman in a formal grey work dress, a maid’s uniform I guess. Filipino maybe. Big smile. She opens the door wider to reveal a frail and thin woman in a white dress. Flesh so thin on her face it looks like her cheeks have been painted in oils across her pronounced cheekbones. A warm smile. A face I know.

‘Good afternoon,’ she says, elegantly bowing her head briefly. ‘You folks from the paper?’

Her hair is grey now. It used to be blonde-white. It still hangs straight and long over her shoulders.

‘I’m Hanna Broz,’ she says, placing her right hand to her chest. But the hand is not a hand at all. It’s a plastic fake but like none I’ve ever seen. It looks like one of Mum’s hands, like it’s been tanned and weathered by the sun. It sticks out of the white sleeve of a cardigan she wears over her dress. I look at her left hand by her side and it’s the same. There are freckles on this one. It’s stiff but it looks real, made of some kind of moulded silicone. All for show and not for function.

‘I’m Eli,’ I say. Don’t say your last name. ‘This is my photographer, Caitlyn.’

‘I might just grab a quick headshot if you don’t mind?’ Caitlyn says.

Hanna nods. ‘That should be fine,’ she says, turning away from the door. ‘Come. Dad is in the reading room out back.’

Maybe Hanna Broz is fifty now. Or forty and tired. Or sixty and grateful. What did she do with the past six or so years since I last saw her? She doesn’t recognise me but I recognise her. That was her father’s eightieth birthday party. Mama Pham’s restaurant in Darra. A different time. A different Eli Bell.

*

The house is a museum of collected antiques and gaudy oil paintings the size of the floor space in my bedroom. A medieval suit of armour holding a jousting stick. An African tribal mask fixed to a wall. Sweeping polished wood floors. A set of Papua New Guinean tribal warrior spears in a corner here. A painting of a lion tearing apart a gazelle over there. A long living room with a fireplace and a television wider than my bed is long.

Caitlyn cranes her neck to a bronze chandelier that looks like a steel huntsman spider weaving a web of lightbulbs.

‘Nice place,’ she says.

‘Thank you,’ Hanna says. ‘We didn’t always live like this. My father came to Australia with nothing. His first home in Queensland was a room shared with six other men in the Wacol immigration camp.’

Hanna stops on the spot. She stares at my face.

‘Do you know it?’ she asks.

‘Know what?’

‘The Wacol East Dependants Holding Camp for Displaced Persons?’

I shake my head.

‘Did you grow up in the outer west?’ she asks. ‘I feel like I know you.’

Smile. Shake my head.

‘Nah, I’m north side,’ I say. ‘Grew up in Bracken Ridge.’

She nods. Staring into my eyes. Hanna Broz digs deep. She turns, scurries on down the hall.

A Napoleon bust. A bust of Captain Cook near a replica Endeavour. A painting of a lion tearing apart a grown man this time. The lion is tearing the man’s limbs off, has two legs and an arm piled beneath his feet, sinking its teeth into the man’s remaining arm.

‘You might have to be patient with Dad,’ Hanna says, pacing through a long dining room to the back of the mansion. ‘He’s not as . . . how should I say . . . robust . . . as he once was. You might have to repeat your questions a couple of times and remember to speak loudly and concisely. He can drift off sometimes like he’s on another planet. He’s had some ill health of late but he’s excited about these awards tonight. In fact, he has a surprise planned for all the guests and he wants to give you two a sneak preview.’

She opens two red wood doors to a vast reading room. It feels like the reading room of a royal. Two floor-to-ceiling walls of bookshelves, left side and right. Hundreds of hardback books with old bindings and gold lettering. Burgundy carpet. Blood-coloured carpet. The room smells like books and old cigar smoke. A dark green velvet reading lounge and two dark green velvet armchairs. There is a large mahogany writing desk at the end of the room and this is where Tytus Broz sits, eyes down, reading a thick hardback book. Behind him is a vast rear wall of glass so clean and pure you could squint your eyes and be convinced there wasn’t a glass wall there at all. The only clue to the door that’s been built into the centre of the glass wall are two sets of polished silver hinges that allow the door to open out to the magical and rambling lawn that runs seemingly for a kilometre or so, past concrete water fountains and perfectly angular hedges and flowerbeds tended by bees and perfect sunlight, down to what looks like a small vineyard, but that view must be a trick of the light because such things can’t be found in the lantana outskirts of Bellbowrie, Brisbane. Resting on his desk is a rectangular box about twenty-five centimetres tall and twenty centimetres wide, draped in a red silk covering cloth.

‘Dad,’ Hanna says.

He doesn’t look up from his reading. White suit. White hair. White spine in my back tingling to tell me to run. Run away now, Eli. Pull back. It’s a trap.

‘Excuse me, Dad,’ Hanna says, louder.

He flips his head up from his book.

‘The people from the paper are here to talk to you,’ Hanna says.

‘Who?’ he spits.

‘This is Eli and his photographer, Caitlyn,’ Hanna says. ‘They’ve come to talk to you about the award you are going to receive tonight.’

Some new sun of remembrance dawns in his mind.

‘Yes!’ he says, pulling the reading glasses from his eyes. He excitedly taps the box covered in the red silk. ‘Come. Sit. Sit.’

We move forward slowly, sit in the two elegant black visitor chairs at his desk. He’s so much older. The Lord of Limbs doesn’t seem as frightening as he seemed to a thirteen-year-old. Time, Slim. Changes faces. Changes stories. Changes points of view.

I could jump right over that desk and strangle his near-dead neck, stab my thumbs into his near-dead zombie eyes. The fountain pen. The fountain pen resting upright in the stand beside his desk phone. I could stab that fountain pen into his chest. His cold white chest. Stab my name into his heart. His cold white heart.

‘Thank you for your time, Mr Broz,’ I say.

He smiles and his lips tremble. His lips are wet with saliva.

‘Yes, yes,’ he says impatiently. ‘What would you like to know?’

I place my ExecTalk Dictaphone on the desk with my left hand, my unseen right hand and its missing digit gripping a pen to take notes on my lap beneath the desk top.

‘Do you mind if I record this?’ I ask.

He shakes his head.

Hanna steps back from us softly and takes a watchful owl position from the dark green reading lounge behind us.

‘You are being honoured at tonight’s Queensland Champions ceremony for your lifelong commitment to enhancing the lives of Queenslanders living with physical disabilities,’ I say. He nods, following my ego-massaging opening set-up closely. ‘What started you on this extraordinary journey in the first place?’

He smiles, points over my shoulder to Hanna, sitting attentively upright on the reading lounge. She smiles, self-consciously smooths her hair behind her right ear.

‘More than half a century ago, that beautiful woman sitting over there was born with a transverse deficiency, what is known as “amelia”,’ he says. ‘She was born with two congenital amputations at the upper arm. A fibrous band within the membrane of the developing foetus that was our Hanna grew constricted.’

He speaks matter-of-factly, like he’s reading from a pancakes recipe. Blood clots forming in the foetus. Stir in four cracked eggs. Rest in fridge for thirty minutes.

‘A tragically complicated birth followed and we lost Hanna’s beloved mother . . .’ He pauses a moment. ‘But . . .’

‘What was her name?’ I ask.

‘Excuse me?’ Tytus says, bristling at the interruption.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Do you mind if I get the spelling of your late wife’s name?’

‘Her name was Hanna Broz, like her daughter,’ he says.

‘Sorry, please go on.’

‘Well . . . where was I?’ Tytus says.

I look at my notepad.

‘You said, “A tragically complicated birth followed and we lost Hanna’s beloved mother” and then you paused and then you said, “But”.’

‘Yes . . . but . . .’ he says. ‘But the world and I were gifted an angel that I vowed, there and then, would lead a life filled with all the riches and wonders available to any other Australian baby born that day.’

He nods at Hanna.

‘I kept my vow,’ he says.

I’m going to be sick. The question pops from my lips but I don’t ask it. Someone else inside of me asks it. Some other being. Someone braver. Someone who doesn’t cry so easily.

‘Are you a good man, Tytus Broz?’ I ask.

Caitlyn whips her head towards me.

‘Excuse me?’ Tytus asks, shocked. Confused.

I stare into his eyes for a long moment. Snap back to my normal piss-weak self.

‘I mean, what’s your advice to other Queenslanders on how they, too, can do so much good for this great State?’

He rests back in his chair, studying my face. His chair swivels and he turns to his side and he looks out through that grand pure and clean all-glass wall and he ponders his answer as the bees tend his pink and purple and red and yellow flowers.

‘Don’t ask for permission to change the world,’ he says. ‘Just go ahead and change it.’

He cups his hands, rests his chin on his fingers contemplatively.

‘I guess, in all honesty, it was the realisation that nobody was going to change the world for me,’ he says, gazing out to a cloudless blue sky. ‘Nobody was going to do the work for me. I had to turn up for all those other kids out there like my Hanna.’

He turns back to his desk.

‘Which brings me to my surprise,’ he says. ‘I have prepared a little treat for tonight’s guests.’

His lips are wet. His voice is raspy and weak. He gives a serpent smile to Caitlyn.

‘Would you like to see it?’

Caitlyn nods, yes.

‘Go on then,’ Tytus says, not moving from his chair.

Caitlyn warily leans forward, removes the red silk cloth.

It’s a rectangular glass box. Pure and clean glass like the glass wall in front of us. Perfect edges, like the whole box was shaped somehow from one sheet of glass. Inside the glass box, fixed to a hidden and small metal stand, is an artificial limb. A right human forearm and hand, propped on the stand as though it was floating.

‘This is my gift to Queensland,’ Tytus says.

It might as well be my hand in there. Caitlyn’s hand. So real it looks. From the skin colour and texture to the natural sun blemishes and discolourations on the forearm to the milky moons rising in the fingernails. The milky moons that make me remember the day I learned to drive with Slim. The freckles on this artificial limb that make me remember my lucky freckle on my lucky finger. There is something dark in the making of this perfect limb. I know this in my soul and in the nub of bone on my missing finger.

‘Human to the touch, human in its movement,’ Tytus says. ‘For the past twenty-five years I have employed and engaged the world’s finest engineers and human movement scientists with a single vision, to transform the lives of limb-deficient kids like my Hanna.’

He fawns over the box like it was a newborn baby.

‘Underline this word in your notebook,’ he says. ‘Electromyography.’

I scribble the word in my notepad. I don’t underline it because I’m too busy underlining the words, ‘Smack empire funds science?’ Four-word story. Can tell it in three words. Drugs fund research. Drugs buy . . .

‘Breakthrough!’ Tytus says. ‘This is only a prototype. High definition anatomically shaped silicone-based exterior. Revolutionary. Transformative. Conspicuously inconspicuous. A genuinely discreet exterior harmoniously integrated into a mechanical interior using electromyography – EMG – signals from existing contracted muscles within the amputee’s residual limbs to control the movement of the artificial limb. Electrodes attached to the skin’s surface record the EMG signals and these beautiful and informative human signals are amplified and processed by motors we have built into several points along our limb. Real movement. Real life. That’s how we change the world.’

The room is silent for a moment.

‘It’s remarkable,’ I say. ‘I imagine there are no limits to where you could take this.’

He beams and laughs, looking over at Hanna behind us.

‘Life without limbs, Hanna?’ he says.

‘Life without limits,’ she says back.

He bangs his fist triumphantly on the table.

‘Life without limits, exactly!’ he says.

He turns around again to that vast cloudless blue sky hanging over his endless green lawn.

‘I have seen the future,’ he says.

‘You have?’ I say.

‘I have.’

Beyond the glass wall of the reading room there is a lone bird in the sky over Tytus Broz’s manicured gardens. Against the backdrop of the eternal blue sky, this small bird zips and whirls and whips through air and the bird’s frantic and electric flight show captures Tytus’s gaze.

‘It’s a world without limits,’ he says. ‘It’s a world where kids born the way Hanna was born can control their prosthetic limbs directly through the brain. Real-life limbs controlled by neural feedback that can reach out and shake your hand or pat a dog in the park or throw a frisbee or bowl a cricket ball or wrap their arms around their mum and dad.’ He breathes deep. ‘That’s a beautiful world.’

The bird outside his glass wall windows dips like a Spitfire fighter plane and then darts unexpectedly upward like a rollercoaster and makes a full loop before changing its flight path dramatically and speeding, unexpectedly, towards us. The bird is flying straight to us, to us three here around this office desk, to me and the girl of my dreams, and the man of my nightmares. I know it can’t see the glass wall. I know it only sees itself. I know it sees a friend. I see the colour of the bird as it nears the glass. Flashes of vivid and electrifying blue on its forehead and tail. Like the blue in the storm lightning I see from the front window of Lancelot Street. Like the blue in my eyes. That kind of blue. Not just azure blue. Magic blue. Alchemy blue.

And the blue bird slams headfirst and hard into the glass wall.

‘Oh my,’ says Tytus, shifting back in his seat.

The bird hovers, stunned by the impact against the glass, flaps its wings and flutters its tail furiously, then flies back from whence it came in a darting left turn that zigs into a right turn that zags into a left and whips into a right again and the bird is bouncing on air like a split atom and it knows not where it’s going until it finds its purpose and that purpose is itself, the other bird it sees in the glass wall, and it flies hard and fast to meet itself once more, zooming into itself, the Spitfire plane, the kamikaze bomber descending from the blue sky. The flashes of an unprecedented blue again on its forehead and tail. And it slams once more into itself. Into the impenetrable glass wall. It hovers, stunned, and flies away again, determined to find itself once more and it does. It zooms around in an arching left turn that seems to never end until it does because the bird rights itself and zips into an air stream that sharpens its blinding velocity.

Caitlyn Spies cares for it, of course, because her heart can accommodate the sky and everything flying therein.

‘Stop it, little birdy,’ she whispers. ‘Stop it.’

But the bird can’t stop. Faster than ever now. Slam. And from that horrid impact, this time it does not hover stunned. It simply drops to the ground. Falls with a soft thud on the gravel outside Tytus Broz’s glass reading room door.

I stand from my chair and Tytus Broz is surprised when he watches me pass his desk and open the glass door out to the vast lawn. The smell of the lawn. The smell of the flowers. Yellow gravel dust and pebbles cracking and scratching beneath the soles of my Dunlops when I kneel down gently beside the fallen bird.

I carefully pick it up with the four fingers of my right hand and I can feel its fragile twig bones beneath that perfect blue as I cup it in the palms of both my hands. It’s warm and soft and the size of a mouse when its wings are tucked up like this. Caitlyn has followed me out here.

‘Is it dead?’ she asks, standing over me.

‘I think it is,’ I say.

The blue on its forehead. More flashes of blue over its little ears and more on its wings, like it flew through some magic blue dust cloud. I study the bird in my hands. This lifeless flyer. It has bewitched me momentarily with its beauty.

‘What sort of bird is that?’ Caitlyn asks.

A blue bird. Are you listening, Eli?

‘Oh, what do you call them again?’ Caitlyn ponders. ‘My grandma gets them in her backyard . . . They’re her favourite bird. It’s so beautiful.’

Caitlyn kneels down, leans over the dead bird, rubs a pinkie finger over its exposed belly.

‘What are you gonna do with it?’ she asks softly.

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

Tytus Broz is now standing in the glass doorway.

‘Is it dead?’ he asks.

‘Yeah, it’s dead,’ I say.

‘Stupid bird seemed so determined to kill itself,’ he says.

Caitlyn slaps her hands.

‘Wren!’ she says. ‘I remember now! That’s a wren.’

And, with that, the dead blue wren comes back. Like it was just waiting for Caitlyn Spies to recognise it, because, like all living things – like me, me, me – it lives and dies on her breath and her attention. Back. Its peppercorn eyes open first and then I feel its feet gently scratch the skin on my palms. Its head moves, a brief rock. Groggy and stunned. The bird’s eyes turn to me and in a flash something is transferred that is beyond my understanding, beyond the universe of here, something tender, but then it’s gone and it’s replaced by the bird’s realisation that it rests in a human hand and some electromyographical signal inside its perfect construction tells its weakened wings to flap. Flap. Flap. And fly away. And we three, Eli Bell and the girl of his dreams and the man of his nightmares, watch the blue bird dart left then right as it finds its strength then loops once again because it likes to be alive. But it does not fly far. It merely flies to the far right side of this grand manicured lawn nursed by a groundsman paid in drug money. It flies over a green wood shed, some kind of tool shed maybe. The shed is open with a green John Deere tractor parked inside it. Then the bird flies further to a concrete structure I have not yet noticed. I missed it. It’s a kind of square concrete bunker hidden in a huddle of elms and covered in jasmine vines and other wild plants lining the lawn’s far right fence. A concrete box with a single white door built into its front and the jasmine vines spill over its roof and connect to the lawn so it looks like the structure has grown up from the earth. The blue bird lands on a vine hanging just above the box’s door. And there it stays, darting its small storm-blue head left and right like it’s as puzzled as much as anyone by the past five minutes of its curious existence.

Curiouser and curiouser. Curious concrete structure. I’m looking at it strangely and Tytus is looking at it strangely and then he knows I’m looking at it strangely.

I forget my right hand is hanging down with its four fingers. Conspicuously conspicuous. Tytus’s old and unreliable eyes zero in on this hand.

I stand quickly, slipping my hands into my pockets. ‘Well, I think I’ve got enough, Mr Broz,’ I say. ‘I better get back and file this thing for tomorrow’s paper.’

He has a puzzled look on his face. Off on another planet. Or maybe just off to five years ago on this planet when he instructed his Polish standover psycho mate, Iwan, to cut off my real-life forefinger from my real-life hand.

He eyeballs me suspiciously.

‘Yes,’ he says, ponderously. ‘Yes. Very well.’

Caitlyn raises her camera.

‘Do you mind if I take a quick snap, Mr Broz?’ Caitlyn asks.

‘Where do you want me?’ he replies.

‘Just back at the desk inside is fine,’ she says.

He sits back at his desk.

‘Big smile,’ Caitlyn says through the lens.

Caitlyn clicks a shot and the camera pops with a blinding flash that hurts all our eyes. Too bright. Stuns us all in the room.

‘Dear God,’ Tytus cries, rubbing his eyes. ‘Turn that flash off.’

‘Sorry, Mr Broz,’ Caitlyn says. ‘This camera must be faulty. Someone should toss it in the repairs cabinet.’

She aims her lens once more.

‘Just one more,’ Caitlyn says, like she’s talking to a three-year-old.

Tytus forces a smile. Fake smile. Artificial smile. Silicone-based.

*

In the Ford Meteor, Caitlyn tosses the camera by my feet in the front passenger seat. ‘Well, that was weird,’ she says.

She turns the ignition. Drives too fast out of Tytus Broz’s driveway.

I’m silent. She does the talking.

‘Okay, gut impressions first,’ she says, talking to herself as much as to her junior reporter. ‘I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but there is something rotten in the State of Queensland,’ she says, pressing hard on the accelerator as the car splits through Bellbowrie scrub on the black bitumen road back to Bowen Hills. ‘To pee or not to pee, that is the question? You ever seen anyone so creepy? You see his old bag of bones body rattling in that suit? He kept licking his lips like he was licking the sticky bit on an envelope.’

She’s rambling dot points, fast and loud. Sometimes she takes her eyes off the road to see my face. ‘I mean, what’s with his daughter and him? What about all that crazy stuff in his house? Okay, where do you want to start?’

I’m looking out the window. I’m thinking of Lyle in the front yard of the Darra house. I’m seeing him standing in his work clothes showered in a rainbow spray from my hose.

‘Let’s start at the end, huh, and work our way forward to the beginning,’ she says.

Forward to the beginning. I like that. That’s all I’ve ever been doing. Moving forward to the start.

‘I don’t know about you but my crazy-meter was tingling all over,’ she says. ‘There’s something wrong with all this, Eli. Something very, very wrong with all this.’

She’s rambling nervously. Filling the silence. She looks across at me. I turn my head to the road in front, repeated broken white bitumen lines lost under the car.

I know what I have to do.

‘I’ve gotta go back,’ I say. I say it louder than I intended. I say it with feeling.

‘Back?’ Caitlyn says. ‘Why do you want to go back?’

‘I can’t say,’ I say. ‘I have to be mute on this. There are things people can’t say. I know that now. There are things too impossible to say out loud so they’re best left unsaid.’

Caitlyn hits the brakes hard and turns the car sharply to a dirt bank on the side of the road. The front wheels lose traction momentarily and she reefs on the steering wheel to keep the vehicle from crashing into a rocky slope on my passenger side. She skids to a stop. Switches off the car.

‘Tell me why we should go back, Eli.’

‘I can’t, you’ll think I’m nuts.’

‘Don’t worry about me thinking you’re nuts because I’ve felt exactly that since the moment I met you,’ she says.

‘You have?’ I reply.

‘Sure,’ she says. ‘You’re a loon, but I mean that in the best possible way. Like a Bowie-type loon, Iggy Pop–type loon, Van Gogh–type loon.’

‘Astrid-type loon,’ I say.

‘Who?’

‘She was a friend of my mum’s when I was a kid,’ I say. ‘I thought she was nuts. But good nuts. Lovable nuts. She told us she heard voices and we all thought she was crazy. She said she heard a voice telling her my brother, August, was special.’

‘He sounds special, from what you’ve told me about him,’ Caitlyn says.

I breathe.

‘I’ve gotta go back,’ I say.

‘Why?’ she asks.

I breathe. Forward to the start. Backwards to the end.

‘The bird,’ I say.

‘What about the bird?’

‘A dead blue wren.’

‘Yeah, the wren?’

‘One day when I was a kid . . .’ And so ends my vow of silence. It lasted a staggering forty-three seconds. ‘. . . I was sitting in Slim’s car and he was teaching me how to drive a manual and I was distracted like I always am and I was staring out the window and I was watching Gus who was sitting on the front fence writing the same sentence in the air with his finger because that was his way of talking. And I could tell what he was writing because I knew how to read his invisible words in the air.’

I pause for a long moment. There’s a semicircle of dust on Caitlyn’s windscreen.

Her windscreen wipers have smeared a rainbow of old dirt over to my passenger side. That rainbow of dirt reminds me of the milky moons in my thumbnails. Those milky moons remind me of that day in the car with Slim. The small details that remind me of him.

‘What was he writing?’ she asks.

The sun is falling. I have to file my story for tomorrow. Brian Robertson will be steaming already. Mum and Dad and Gus are probably travelling into Brisbane City Hall now. Gus’s big night. A confluence of events. A convergence. Detail upon detail.

‘He wrote, “Your end is a dead blue wren.”’

‘What was that supposed to mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I don’t even think Gus knew what it meant or why he was saying it, but he said it. And one year later, they were the first words I ever heard come out of his mouth. The night they took Lyle away. He looked into Tytus Broz’s eyes and he said, “Your end is a dead blue wren.” It means that dead blue wren represents some kind of end for Tytus Broz.’

‘But that bird in your hand wasn’t dead, it flew away, and I’m not even sure if it was a wren,’ she says.

‘It felt like it was dead to me,’ I say. ‘But it came back. And that’s what Gus is always saying. We come back. I don’t know. Old souls, like Astrid used to say. Everybody’s got an old soul but only the special ones like Gus get to know that. Everything that happens has happened. Everything that is going to happen has happened. Or somethin’ like that. I got up and went out to that bird and I picked it up because I felt like I had to. And then it went and landed on that concrete bunker thing at the side of the lawn.’

‘That bunker did give me the creeps,’ Caitlyn says.

She looks ahead down the winding road back home. The setting orange sun lighting her deep brown hair. Her fingers tap the steering wheel.

‘I never believed Gus was special,’ I say. ‘I didn’t believe Astrid could hear voices from spirits. I didn’t believe a word of it. But . . .’

I stop. She looks across at me.

‘But what?’

‘But then I met you and I started believing in all kinds of things.’

She gives a half-smile. ‘Eli,’ she says, dropping her head, ‘I think it’s real sweet how you feel for me.’

I shake my head, shift in my seat.

‘I see you when you look at me,’ she says.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry. I think it’s beautiful. I don’t think anyone’s ever looked at me like you look at me.’

‘You don’t have to say it,’ I say.

‘Say what?’

‘What you’re gonna say about the timing,’ I say. ‘How I’m still a boy. Or maybe only just a man. You’re gonna say the universe fucked it up. It put me near you but the timing was off. Nice try but about a decade out. You don’t have to say it.’

She nods. Curls up her lips.

‘Wow,’ she gasps. ‘Is that what I was gonna say? Damn, how about that? Here I was thinking I was gonna tell you all about a strange feeling I had when I first met you.’

Caitlyn starts the car, slams the accelerator and spins the tyres as she pulls a sharp U-turn back in the direction of Tytus Broz’s mansion.

‘What did you feel?’ I ask.

‘Sorry, Eli Bell,’ she says. ‘Not enough time. I think I just worked out what’s in that bunker.’

‘What’s in there?’

‘Well, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘The end is in there, Eli,’ she says, leaning hard on the steering wheel as the tyres howl on the bitumen road. ‘The end.’

*

In a soft twilight we’re parked in dark shadow under a sprawling purple jacaranda tree that rises up to the top of Tytus Broz’s fence, some fifty metres from the security gate. A small white Daihatsu Charade pulls out of the gate, turns left onto the road into the city.

‘That them?’ I ask.

‘No,’ Caitlyn says. ‘Car’s too small, too cheap. That was the help.’

She nods to the glove box.

‘Look inside the glove box will you, there should be a little flashlight,’ she says.

I pop the glove box open, sift through six or seven scrunched tissues, two small notepads, eight or so chewed pens, a pair of yellow-rimmed sunglasses, a cassette tape of Disintegration by The Cure and, about the size of a lipstick, a small green flashlight with a black push-button on one end and a small bulb the size of a human iris.

I switch it on and the light flashes a pitiful beam of artificial light big enough to illuminate a night-time barbecue held by a family of green ants.

‘What sort of torch is this?’ I ask.

‘I use it when I can’t get my key in the door at home late at night.’

Caitlyn snatches the flashlight from my hand and sharpens her gaze ahead.

‘Here they come,’ she says.

A silver Mercedes Benz pulls out of the driveway. Chauffeur-driven. Tytus and his daughter Hanna Broz in the back seat. The Mercedes turns left out of the driveway, motors on towards the city. Caitlyn reaches into the footwell on my side, grabs her camera from the faulty camera cabinet and slings the black strap over her left shoulder.

‘Let’s go,’ Caitlyn says.

She slips out of the car, lifts her left Dr Martens boot up to the joint of the jacaranda tree where three main branches of the trunk split off in separate directions. A rip in the left knee of her black jeans stretches further as she hauls herself up. She then monkey crawls up one thick branch that rises up to the top of the clay-coloured fence. She doesn’t think. She only acts. Caitlyn Spies. A doer. I get lost for a moment just watching her move. The natural courage in her. Not even blinking before she crawls up a branch high enough to break her neck if her trusty British boots slipped off it.

‘What are you waiting for?’ she asks.

I lift my left leg up to the tree’s central trunk joint, my rear thigh muscle threatening to tear. She stands on the branch and walks it like a gymnast on a balance beam before lying down, hugging the branch momentarily and reaching her legs down ambitiously towards the clay-coloured wall the branch has grown above. Next, she stands on the wall, crouches down, then drops her legs over the side while pressing her belly hard against the top. She pays her potential landing only half-a-second of attention then releases her grip and vanishes.

I crawl up the branch, less graceful. Darkness now. I jump to the wall, dangle my legs over the side. I pray the landing is soft. Drop. My feet find earth and the impact knocks me off them. I stagger backwards and land hard on my arse bones.

A yard in darkness. I can see the lights on in Tytus’s mansion ahead but I can’t see Caitlyn in the dark of the lawn. ‘Caitlyn?’ I whisper. ‘Caitlyn.’

Her hand on my shoulder.

‘Minus ten for the dismount,’ she says. ‘C’mon.’

She scurries low and quick across the lawn, skirting the left side of the grand house we walked through with Hanna only hours ago. We’re like special ops soldiers. Chuck Norris in The Octagon. Low and hard. Round the corner of the house, onto the rear lawn. Stone fountains. Hedge mazes. Floral garden beds. We split through these, sprinting on towards the white door of the bunker being swallowed whole by vines and shrubbery and weed. Caitlyn stops at the door. We both keel forward, sucking in air, hands on thighs. Journalism and sprinting are chalk and cheese, oil and water, Hawke and Keating.

Caitlyn turns the silver knob on the door.

‘Locked,’ she says.

I suck in more air.

‘Maybe you should go back to the car,’ I say.

‘Why?’

‘Sentencing ladder,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘The sentencing ladder,’ I say. ‘Right now we’re probably on the bottom rung of the sentencing ladder. Trespassing onto property. I’m about to go up a rung.’

‘To what?’

I walk to the small tool shed neighbouring the bunker.

‘Breaking and entering,’ I say.

The smell of oil and petrol in the tool shed. I pad down the side of the parked John Deere tractor. A row of gardening and lawn tools leaning against the back of the tool shed. A hoe. A pick. A shovel. A rusty-bladed axe. An axe big enough to chop off Darth Vader’s melon.

I pad back to the bunker door, holding the axe in both hands.

The answer, Slim. Boy finds question. Boy finds answer.

I raise the axe high above my shoulder, its heavy rusted blade aligned on a rough trajectory towards the five centimetres of door space between the doorknob and the door edge.

‘I feel like I’ve gotta do this,’ I say. ‘But you don’t have to, Caitlyn. You should go back to the car.’

She stares into my eyes. The moon above us. She shakes her head.

I loosen my shoulder to swing. I go to swing.

‘Eli, wait,’ Caitlyn says.

I stop.

‘What is it?’

‘I just had a thought,’ she says.

‘Yeah?’

‘Your end is a dead blue wren?’ she says.

‘Yeah.’

‘What if it’s not even about Tytus Broz’s end? What if “your end” means your end? The end for you, not for him.’

This notion makes me shiver. It’s suddenly cold here by this dark bunker. We look at each other for a long moment and I’m grateful for this moment with her, even if I’m terrified and even if I know somewhere deep inside me that she is right about the possibility that ‘your end’ means my end and my end means our end. The end of Caitlyn and Eli.

And I bring the blade down on the door and the axe bites hard and violently into a door that is already weather-beaten. Wood fragments pop and split and I bring the blade back up and I plunge it into the door again, much like, if I’m honest with myself, the blade I see in my mind’s eye plunging into Tytus Broz’s geriatric skull. The bunker door flies open, revealing a concrete staircase descending sharply, deep into the earth. Only moonlight illuminates the staircase to the sixth step and the rest is darkness.

Caitlyn stands at my shoulder, looking down into the staircase.

‘What the hell is this, Eli?’ she says gravely.

I shake my head, walk down the staircase.

‘I don’t know.’

I count the steps going down. Six, seven, eight . . . twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Then the ground. Concrete ground beneath my feet.

‘You smell that?’ Caitlyn asks.

The smell of disinfectant. Bleach. Cleaning products.

‘It smells like a hospital,’ Caitlyn says.

I rub my hands along the walls in the darkness. Concrete besser block walls on both sides of a hall – a walkway, a tunnel – maybe two metres wide.

‘Your flashlight,’ I say.

‘Right,’ Caitlyn says.

She reaches into her pocket. Her thumb clicks the torch and a small orb of white light illuminates about a foot of space in front of us. Enough to see the white door built into the left side of the concrete hall. Enough to see the white door on the right side directly facing the door on the left.

‘Oohhhhhh shit,’ Caitlyn murmurs. ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.’

‘You wanna get outta here?’ I ask.

‘Not yet,’ she says.

I walk further into the darkness. Caitlyn turns the knobs on both doors.

‘Locked,’ she says.

The polished concrete floor. The claustrophobic hall. Rough concrete walls. Dead air and disinfectant. Caitlyn’s shaky light bounces along the walls. Five metres into darkness. Ten metres into the darkness. Then the pitiful flashlight lands on two more white doors built into the hall. Caitlyn turns the door handles.

‘Locked,’ she says.

We walk on. Another six metres, seven metres into darkness. And the hallway ends. The underground tunnel ends on one more white door.

Caitlyn reaches for the knob.

‘Locked,’ she says. ‘What now?’

Forward to the beginning. Backwards to the end.

I rush back down the hall to the first door we passed.

I drive the axe into the door latch. Once, twice, three times. The door flies open in a splintery mess of door chips and cracks and splinters.

Caitlyn shines the flashlight into the room. The room is the size of a standard home garage. She enters the room, waves the light around furiously, nothing steady in her movements, so all that we see comes in brief flashes. Workbenches line the walls and on these workbenches are cutting tools and power saws and moulding instruments interspersed with artificial limbs in various stages of creation. A plastic arm falling over at the elbow, unfinished. A metal shin and foot, like something from science fiction. A foot made of carbon. Hands made of silicone and metal. It’s a mini artificial limb lab. But there’s nothing professional about it. It’s the laboratory of a madman. Too busy to be the work of someone qualified. Too rabid.

I cross the hallway to the second room. Dig the axe five times into the space between the doorknob and the door edge. Something primal driving me, something vicious and animal. Fear. The answers, maybe. The end. Your end is a dead blue wren. The door cracks and I kick the rest in with my shoe, stomping and stomping and stomping. The door opens and Caitlyn’s light falls upon another work room, this one with three benches surrounding a medical operating table and what rests upon this operating table makes us reel back in horror because it looks like a headless human body but it is not. It is an artificial body, a fake plastic body comprised of artificial limbs; a silicone-based torso roughly connected to a monstrous mix of limbs with uneven skin tones. A morbid hybrid horror of hack-test-dummy artificial-limb experimentation.

I run to the next door on the left, further up this horror movie hall, this spook hall like something from a fairground sideshow alley; a man missing his two front teeth is going to appear soon in a ticket booth, selling popcorn and another ticket to Tytus Broz’s Bunker of Doom. I drive the axe into the door, this time with more force because I’ve got a run-up. Hack. Hack. Crack. Shrieks of splintered wood as the door pops open. I kick it further ajar and pad breathlessly into this next room, my heart bracing for the impact of what we’ll find. Caitlyn’s light bounces erratically across the room. Concrete walls. Flash. Shelving. Flash. Glass specimen jars. Rectangular glass boxes, perfectly blown from one piece of perfect glass. Something inside the glass boxes. Something hard to see in the darkness, in such poor light from Caitlyn’s flashlight. Scientific specimens, my brain tells me, replacing grim fact with something I can understand. The stonefish my old high-school teacher, Bill Cadbury, kept above his desk in a jar of preservation fluid. Those specimen jars I saw in the old Queensland Museum on school excursions, jars holding organic matter. Preserved starfish. Preserved eels. Preserved platypus. That makes sense. That’s something I understand. Caitlyn’s orb of light finds another medical table in the centre of this room and upon this table is another artificial body of connected limbs. Another body built from artificial feet, legs, arms; four limbs and a woman’s silicone-sleeved torso. I understand this. This is within my knowing. Science. Experimentation. Engineering. Research.

But, wait. Wait, Slim. The breasts on this artificial adult female body are pale white and saggy and . . . and . . . and . . .

‘Oh my God,’ Caitlyn gasps. She unslings her faulty camera from her left shoulder and, in a kind of trance, snaps several photographs of the room.

‘It’s real,’ she says. ‘They’re fucking real, Eli.’

Snap. The camera’s flash pops, too bright for such a dark room. It stuns my eyes but it lights up the room too. Snap, she goes again. And this time my eyes adjust enough to take the whole room in. Not platypus. Not eel. The glass boxes are filled with human limbs. Ten, fifteen glass boxes across the shelves lining the walls. A human hand floating in a gold-copper-coloured formaldehyde solution. A human foot floating in glass. A forearm with no hand attached to it. A calf sawn neatly at the ankle so it looks like a leg of butcher-cut ham. Snap. The faulty and too-bright camera flash illuminates the medical table and Caitlyn vomits where she stands because the body on the table is a composite of uneven limbs, all frozen in time. Plastinates. Impregnated with a plastic solvent. Bathed in a liquid polymer. Cured and hardened in this room that smells like a hospital.

‘What the fuck is going on here, Eli?’ Caitlyn shudders.

I take her flashlight from her hand and run it over the body on the medical table. Epoxy resin covers the limbs so they shine in light, resemble the body parts of a waxwork. Each limb is disconnected from the other. Feet placed against shins and thighs but not fully attached. Arms placed beside shoulder joints but not connected. It’s like we’ve walked into some macabre problem-solving game tasking children to fashion a full human body from a toy box of plastinates. The flashlight runs along the body. Legs. Belly. Breasts. And the head of a woman who was smiling beside fake flowers in a shopping mall family portrait on page 3 of today’s Courier-Mail. It’s the plastinate head of Regina Penn.

By the medical table is a metal tray on rollers holding a large white plastic tub filled with a toxic-smelling liquid, another kind of clear preservation fluid. I take two cautious steps to this bucket and peer inside to find the head of Regina’s husband, Glenn, staring up at me.

I hand Caitlyn the flashlight and I run out the door of this fever room, raising the axe that I plunge hard into the locked white door on the other side of the hall.

‘Eli, slow down!’ Caitlyn screams.

But I can’t slow down. I can’t, Slim. My arms are heavy and tired and I’m exhausted, slowed by fatigue but energised at the same time by shock and dread and curiosity.

I swing the axe again and it shatters the door at its lock. Kick, stomp, bash, stomp. Open.

I stand panting in the room’s entryway. Caitlyn brushes my right shoulder as she enters the room and runs the small flashlight across this space in a one-eighty-degree arc. The room smells of harsh and cooked plastics. The room smells of work and disinfectant and formaldehyde. No medical table in the centre of the room. But more workbenches and more shelves lining the walls. Caitlyn’s light falls upon the workbenches and there is a collection of tools spread across the benches: cutting tools, scraping tools, moulding tools, hammers and saws, dark hardware for dark work. More tools spill from an old black leather bag, resting on its side, like a bookie’s tote bag. Beside the black bag is a collection of smaller specimen jars. These jars are the size of Vegemite jars or peanut butter jars. I approach these small jars.

‘Can I use the flashlight?’ I ask.

I bring the light close, I lift a random jar from the group of ten or so all filled with preservation fluid. There is a label made from torn masking tape fixed to the yellow lid of the jar. I run the light across the label, written in a rough cursive: Male, 24, L ear. I hold the jar into the light to inspect a twenty-four-year-old man’s left ear floating in fluid.

I hold a second jar up.

Male, 41, R thumb.

I run the flashlight over the masking tape labels on the jars.

Male, 37, R hallux.

I raise the glass up to my eyes to see a floating severed big toe.

Male, 34, R ring finger.

I scan six more jars and settle the flashlight on one last jar.

Male, 13, R index.

I hold this jar up. The light of Caitlyn’s torch makes the preservation fluid shine like a golden sea. And inside this golden sea is a pale right forefinger that reminds me of home because there is a freckle on the middle knuckle of it that reminds me of the freckle Slim’s girl, Irene, had high up on her inner left thigh, that freckle of hers that became something sacred in Slim’s mind way down in the hole. Sounds crazy, Slim, I said, but I have a freckle here on the middle knuckle of my right forefinger and I have this feeling inside me that this freckle brings me luck. My lucky freckle, Slim. My silly sacred freckle.

‘What is it?’ Caitlyn asks.

‘It’s my . . .’ I can’t finish the sentence. I can’t say it aloud because I’m not sure this is real. ‘It’s . . . mine.’

‘This is insane, Eli,’ Caitlyn says. ‘We have to get outta here.’

I shine the flashlight to the shelves above me. I’m steeled now because I’m whole and because this is a dream. I’m dreaming this. This nightmare is fantasy.

So, of course, there are human heads lining the shelves. Faces of small-time criminals. Plastinates. The grotesque plastinated heads of small-time and big-time criminals. Trophies, maybe. Research tools, more likely. Black hair and brown hair and blond. A man with a moustache. A Pacific Islander man. Men with puffy lips and damaged faces where they’ve been beaten, tortured. I’m dizzied by these faces. Sickened and frenzied.

‘Eli, let’s go,’ Caitlyn says.

But one head keeps me still. One face keeps me frozen. The flashlight finds it at the end of a shelf above me. And I know immediately I am standing inside a moment of trauma. The trauma is in me and the trauma that will happen has already happened. But the face makes me move. This face I love.

I reach for the black bag on the bench, tip it upside down and the tools inside it clatter against the concrete floor.

‘What are you doing?’ Caitlyn asks.

I reach my right arm high up on the shelf above me.

‘We’re gonna need this one,’ I say.

‘What for?’ she asks, turning her eyes away from me, outwardly repulsed.

‘For the end of Tytus Broz.’

*

Axe in my hand. Black leather tote bag over my shoulder. I’m shuffling behind Caitlyn as we scurry back down the hall. Hope in our hearts. Hearts in our throats.

‘Wait,’ I say. I stop on the spot. ‘What about the door at the end?’

‘Let the cops open that one,’ Caitlyn says. ‘We’ve seen enough.’

I shake my head.

‘Bevan,’ I say.

I turn and run back towards the last locked door at the end of the corridor, heaving the axe over my shoulder. This is what a good man does, Slim. Good men are brash and brave and fly by the seat of their pants that are held up by suspenders made of choice. This is my choice, Slim. Do what is right, not what is easy. Crack. The axe drives into the final door. Do what is human. August would do this. Crack. Lyle would have done this. Crack. Dad would do this. Crack.

The good-bad men in my life helping me swing this rusty axe. The doorknob falls off and the splintered door pops open.

I push it wider, stand in the doorway as it swings to a right angle. Caitlyn’s feeble light is waving behind me, beaming over my right shoulder to settle on a pair of blue eyes. An eight-year-old boy named Bevan Penn. Short dusty brown hair. Dirt over his face. Caitlyn steadies her light on the boy and the scene becomes clearer. The boy stands in an empty room with a concrete floor and concrete walls like the other rooms. But there are no workbenches or shelves in this room. There is only a cushioned stool. And upon this stool is a red telephone and the boy holds the red telephone’s handset to his ear. Confusion over his face. Fear, too. But also something else. Knowing.

He holds the handset out to me. He wants me to take it. I shake my head.

‘Bevan, we’re gonna get you outta here,’ I say.

The boy nods. He drops his head and weeps. He’s lost his mind down here. He holds the handset up to me again. I walk closer to him, grip the handset tentatively. I bring the handset to my right ear.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello, Eli,’ says the voice down the phone line.

That same voice from last time. The voice of a man. A real man type man. Deep and raspy, weary maybe.

‘Hi.’

Caitlyn watches me, stunned. I turn away from her. Turn my eyes to the boy, Bevan Penn, watching me, expressionless.

‘It’s me, Eli,’ the man says. ‘It’s Gus.’

‘How’d you find me down here?’

‘I dialled the number for Eli Bell,’ he says. ‘I dialled 77—’

‘I know the number,’ I say, cutting him off. ‘773 8173.’

‘That’s right, Eli.’

‘I know this isn’t real,’ I say.

‘Sssshhhhh,’ the man says. ‘She already thinks you’re crazy enough.’

‘I know you’re just the voice in my head,’ I say. ‘You’re a figment of my imagination. I use you to escape from moments of great trauma.’

‘Escape?’ the man echoes. ‘What, like Slim over the Boggo Road walls? Escape from yourself, Eli, do ya, like the Houdini of your own mind?’

‘773 8173,’ I say. ‘That’s just the number we’d tap into the calculator when we were kids. That’s just “Eli Bell” upside down and back to front.’

‘Brilliant!’ the man says. ‘Upside down and back to front, like the universe, hey Eli? You still got the axe?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ the man says. ‘He’s coming, Eli.’

‘Who?’

‘He’s already here, Eli.’

And then a fluorescent bar light fixed to the ceiling above us shimmers twice and flicks on. I drop the handset, let it hang from the cord. The whole underground hall is lit up now, ceiling lights buzzing to life from one main power source.

‘Oh fuck,’ whispers Caitlyn. ‘Who’s that?’

‘That’s Iwan Krol,’ I whisper.

*

It’s the flip-flops we hear first, the rubber thongs of a menacing Queenslander descending the concrete steps to this man-made hell bunker. Flip. Flop. Flip. Flop. Rubber on concrete. Walking down the hall now. The sound of busted doors swinging open. First door on the left. First on the right. Flip. Flop. Flip. Flop. The second door on the left swinging open, kicked at twice. A long silence. The sound of the second door on the right swinging open. A long creaking swing, the hinges busted. Another long silence. Flip. Flop. Flip. Flop. Rubber on concrete. Close now. Too close. My weak bones stiffen. My amateur heart frozen. My amateur mongrel lost to me now.

Iwan Krol reaches the door to this room. The red telephone room. He stands in the entryway. Blue thongs. Light blue short-sleeved button-up shirt tucked into dark blue shorts. He’s an elderly man now. But he’s still tall and muscular and sun-damaged. There is strength in those arms. A man who works a farm when he’s not sawing the limbs off small-time Queensland criminals who made the fatal mistake of meeting Tytus Broz. The silver hair that was once only creeping from his scalp into a ponytail has fully evacuated, along with his ponytail. His dark eyes. His twisted crazy eye smile that says he likes having three innocents cornered like this in a room beneath the earth.

‘Only one way out,’ he smiles.

We’re standing in the farthest corner of the concrete room, Caitlyn and I forming a protective wedge around Bevan Penn, who huddles behind us. I’m not holding the axe any more because Bevan’s holding it, hiding it behind my back, as per my dubious plan to get us the fuck out of this nightmare.

‘We’re journalists from The Courier-Mail,’ Caitlyn says.

We’re moving back, moving back, deeper into the corner until there’s no more corner left to move back into.

‘Our editor is fully aware of our whereabouts.’

Iwan Krol nods. Weighs up the possibility of this. Stares into Caitlyn’s eyes.

‘What you meant to say was, “You were journalists from The Courier-Mail,”’ he says. ‘And if, by chance, your editor is indeed at that swanky do in town with my employer and he is indeed thinking about you down here beneath my employer’s lawn, then . . .’ – he shrugs, pulling a shining and long Bowie knife out from behind his pants – ‘I guess I better make this quick.’

He marches forward like a heavyweight boxer leaving a blue corner at the sound of a bell. Predatory.

I let him come closer. Closer. Closer. Three metres away. Two metres away.

Half a metre from us.

‘Now,’ I say.

And Caitlyn points her faulty camera at Iwan Krol’s face and clicks a blinding flash. The predator turns his head, momentarily stunned, still recalibrating his eyesight as the axe that is now in my hands takes an achingly long arcing journey towards his body. I’m aiming for his torso but the camera flash is so bright it stuns me too, and my aim is skewed. The rusty axe blade misses his chest and his belly and his waist completely but it finds flesh at the end of its journey, lodges into the mid-dorsal area of his left foot. The axe blade cuts clean through the foot and his stupid fucking blue flip-flop and digs into concrete. He looks down at his foot, transfixed by the scene. We’re transfixed by it too. Curiously, he doesn’t howl in agony. He studies his foot the way a brontosaurus might have studied fire. He raises his left leg and the ankle end of his foot raises in the air with it but all five toes stay planted to the concrete. Five grubby toes resting on a cut cake of rubber flip-flop.

His eyes and my eyes move at once from his foot to meet on the same eye line. Rage fills his face. Red death. The predator. The reaper.

‘Run!’ I scream.

Iwan Krol swings his Bowie knife swiftly at my neck but I’m swift too. I’m Parramatta Eels halfback Peter Sterling, ducking and weaving under a swinging arm from a Canterbury Bulldogs prop. The heavy black leather tool bag tucked under my left shoulder is now my old leather football. I duck and step left as Caitlyn and Bevan Penn run right and we meet at the door of this dark and evil place.

‘Go!’ I scream.

Bevan runs in front, then Caitlyn, then me.

‘Don’t stop,’ I scream.

Sprinting. Sprinting. Past the open doors to these sick rooms, these Frankenstein rooms with the real and fake body parts, these underground dens of design where madness and mongrel take hold because in the ground we’re that much closer to hell. Sprinting. Sprinting. To the stairs that go up to life. To the stairs that go up to a future with me in it. First step, second step, third step. I turn around as I climb the stairs and the last I see of Tytus Broz’s secret underground play space is a Polish-Queensland psychopath named Iwan Krol limping down the concrete hall painting a trail of blood with his axe-cut left foot. The blood is burgundy.

*

The tyres on the Ford Meteor screech around the corner from Countess Street into Roma Street. Caitlyn shifts gears with her left hand and turns the wheel in sharp, deliberate jolts, slams the accelerator into and out of bends. Something deep in her eyes. Trauma, maybe. The magnitude of the scoop, maybe. Which reminds me of work. Which reminds me of Brian Robertson.

The face on the clock on the Brisbane City Hall clock tower is the same silver colour as the full moon. The face on the clock says it’s 7.35 p.m. and I’ve missed my deadline for tomorrow’s paper. I see visions of Brian Robertson in his office bending bars of steel in anger as he curses my name for not filing twenty measly centimetres of fawning colour about the glories of a Queensland Champion named Tytus Broz.

I find Bevan Penn in the reflection in the rearview mirror. He sits in the back seat. He stares out his window, stares up at that full moon. He hasn’t said a word since our car tyres left a cloud of gravel dust to blow on that sprawling jacaranda in Bellbowrie. Maybe he never will say a word again. Some things can’t be put into words.

‘Nowhere to park,’ Caitlyn says. ‘Nowhere to fucking park.’

The central CBD gutters of Adelaide Street are lined with cars.

‘Fuck it,’ Caitlyn says.

She yanks on the steering wheel hard. The Ford cuts across Adelaide Street and bounces hard up a kerb into King George Square, the central meeting point of the city of Brisbane, a paved square of manicured lawns and military statues and a rectangular fountain kids piss in when they’ve drunk too much lemonade at the annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony.

Caitlyn slams on the brakes directly outside the Brisbane City Hall entry doors.

A young male City Hall security guard rushes to the car. Caitlyn winds her window down in expectation.

‘You can’t park here,’ the security guard says, dumbstruck, clearly disturbed by this unexpected threat to the hall’s security.

‘I know,’ she says. ‘Call the police. Tell them Bevan Penn is in my car. I won’t be moving until they get here.’

Caitlyn winds up her window and the security guard fumbles for the two-way radio on his belt.

I nod at Caitlyn.

‘I’ll be back,’ I say.

She gives a half-smile.

‘I’ll keep this guy distracted,’ she says. ‘Good luck, Eli Bell.’

The security guard barks into his transceiver. I slip out of the car and scurry in the opposite direction from City Hall, past the water fountain and across King George Square, then I double back, taking a wide and clandestine angle to the hall’s grand entry door, behind the security guard who is busy shouting at Caitlyn through her closed car window. There’s a welcome desk inside the hall. A bright, beaming Indian woman on the desk.

‘I’m here for the awards,’ I say.

‘Your name, sir?’

‘Eli Bell.’

She scans a wad of papers with printed names. I have the black tote bag over my left shoulder. I slip it off my shoulder, down behind the desk, out of her view.

‘Have they announced the community awards yet?’

‘I believe they’re announcing them now,’ she says.

She finds my name, ticks it with her pen. She tears a ticket from a pad, hands it to me.

‘You’re in row M, sir,’ she says. ‘Seat seven.’

I scurry to the doors of the auditorium. A vast and round room built for fine music. Maybe five hundred red chairs and important people in black suits and nice dresses, divided into two main groups split by a central aisle. Polished wood floors running to a polished wood stage with five levels of choir staging before a backdrop of imposing brass and silver acoustic pipes.

The MC tonight is the woman who reads the news for Channel Seven, Samantha Bruce. She comes on every afternoon, straight after Wheel of Fortune. Dad calls Samantha Bruce a ‘quinella’. A double win. Easy on the eye but bright too. He recently confessed this adoration for the newsreader when I asked him if he would ever entertain marrying another woman and he came back with his quinella theory and how his dream date would be a night with Samantha Bruce in Kookas restaurant at the Bracken Ridge Tavern, during which Samantha Bruce would stare longingly across the table at him, whispering the same word over and over: ‘Perestroika’. I then asked Dad what the womanly equivalent of a trifecta would be.

‘Shuang Chen,’ he said.

‘Who’s Shuang Chen?’ I asked.

‘She’s a Shanghai dental nurse I read about.’

‘What makes her the trifecta?’

‘She was born with three tits.’

Samantha Bruce leans into a lectern microphone.

‘Now we move to our Community Champions,’ the newsreader MC says. ‘These are the unsung Queensland heroes who are always putting themselves last. Well, ladies and gentlemen, tonight we put them first and foremost in our collective heart.’

The packed house applauds. I walk through the central aisle, looking at row numbers on the edge of seats. Row W for why. Row T for the time has come for Tytus Broz. Row M for my mum and my dad. Sitting together seven seats along row M. My parents. Two spare chairs beside them. Mum sparkles in a black dress that shimmers in some form of light that shines down on her and I look up to find where that light comes from and it’s the ceiling of the auditorium. The whole ceiling is a domed silver-white moon that takes on the colours of the greens and reds and purples that flash on stage. The full moon inside this theatre.

Dad wears a grey vinyl jacket that he obviously bought for $1.50 at the Sandgate St Vinnies. Aquamarine slacks. The fashion sense of a twenty-year agoraphobe who never sees enough humans to follow fashion. But he made it here and the fact he made it here and is still sitting here makes me all wet-eyed. Cheesy fuck I am. Even after everything. All that warped madness beneath the earth. The blinky tears again.

An usher taps me on the shoulder.

‘Are you lost?’ the usher asks.

‘No, I’m not lost,’ I say.

Mum spots me out of the corner of her eye. She smiles and hurries me to her with a wave.

The newsreader starts reading names into the lectern microphone.

‘Magdalena Godfrey, Coopers Plains,’ she says.

Magdalena Godfrey proudly walks on stage from its left wing. She beams as she receives a gold medal on a Queensland maroon ribbon and a certificate from a man on stage in a suit. The man in the suit puts his arm around Magdalena and ushers her towards a photographer front-of-stage who snaps three quick shots of Magdalena giving a goofy smile over her certificate. On the third shot, Magdalena bites into her gold medal for laughs.

‘Sourav Goldy, Stretton,’ Samantha Bruce says.

Sourav Goldy takes the stage and bows, takes a certificate and his gold medal.

I squeeze past six people pulling their knees back courteously in their seats. My black tote bag bumps their heads and their shoulders as I pass.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ Mum whispers.

‘I was working on a story.’

‘What the hell do you have in that bag?’

Dad leans over.

‘Ssssshhhh,’ he says. ‘Gus is up.’

‘August Bell, Bracken Ridge.’

August pads onto the stage. His black jacket doesn’t fit him well, his tie’s too loose and his cream-coloured chinos are ten centimetres too long and his hair is scruffy, but he’s happy and so is my mum, who drops the evening’s booklet program on the ground in a hurry so she has two free hands to clap her brilliant selfless weirdo mute son.

Dad puts a forefinger and thumb in his mouth, blowing a sharp and inappropriate whistle like he’s calling an outback cattle dog home at sunset.

Prompted by Mum’s applause, a vigorous clapping spreads through the auditorium and this makes my mum so proud she has to stand to keep from exploding.

August shakes hands with the man in the suit, gratefully accepts his medal and certificate. He smiles proudly for his photograph; he waves into the crowd and Mum waves back desperately, despite the fact August’s wave was more general, in a queen’s drive-by kind of way. Mum’s going through the six stages of motherly loving: pride, elation, regret, gratitude, hope and pride again. Each of these stages is navigated through tears. August then walks off the right side of the stage.

I stand and begin squeezing past the knees of the people sitting beside me to my right.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Excuse me. My apologies. Sorry about this.’

‘Eli,’ Mum whisper-screams. ‘Where are you going?’

I turn and offer a wave that I hope conveys my hope to be back at my seat in a brief moment. I rush up the central aisle to the back of the auditorium and make for a side door that opens to a walkway where backstage staffers in black shirts and black pants are buzzing about with coffee urns and teacups and silver platters of scones and biscuits. I run forward a few steps, then go back to a walk when an official- and important-looking woman gives me a quizzical eye. I smile casually like I’m meant to be there. Confidence, Slim. Moving in magic. She doesn’t know a thing because I move in magic. I turn through a door that looks like it’s heading to the toilets and the official-looking woman with the evil eye continues up the side-of-hall walkway. I go back out the doorway I just came through and slip casually and efficiently behind a black curtain at the side of the stage.

August. He walks towards me. A big curling smile on his face with his gold medal bouncing on his chest as he springs along the polished wooden floors of the stage wing. But his smile fades when he sees my smile fade.

‘What is it, Eli?’

‘I found him, Gus.’

‘Who?’

I open the black tote bag and August looks inside. He stares down into the bag. August says nothing.

He nods his head to the side. Follow me.

He hurries to the door of a green room running off the side-of-stage area, opens it swiftly. A carpeted room. Tables and chairs. Hard black instrument cases. Speaker equipment. A fruit platter of orange and rockmelon skins, watermelon pieces half eaten. August shuffles to a chrome tool tray on wheels. On the tray sits a box covered in a red silk cloth. A name card sits beside it. Tytus Broz. August lifts one corner of the silk cloth to reveal Tytus Broz’s glass box holding his prototype-silicone-arm life’s work. His big reveal. His great gift to the State of Queensland.

August doesn’t say something. What he doesn’t say is, Pass me the bag, Eli.

*

We slip back out the side of the black curtain into the hall’s side thoroughfare. Moving quickly now. The brothers Bell. The survivors, Eli and August, the Queensland Champion. The gold medallist and his younger brother who worships him. Walking hard. Then the official who gave me the evil eye before gives me that same evil eye again as she passes back down the walkway and time slows in this moment because that woman is ushering a man to the backstage area. An old man dressed in white. White suit. White hair. White shoes. White bones. The old man catches sight of my face late and my face registers in his mind only after I’ve passed by his shoulder. Time and perspective. Time doesn’t exist and from any perspective this scene would always see Tytus Broz stop and scratch his head as he wonders about the young man he passed carrying the black tote bag just like the one he keeps in his bunker of very bad things. But from any perspective he would be puzzled because when time resumed at normal speed we would always be gone. Escaped. Gone to see our mum and dad.

*

‘And at last we come to our final award for the evening, ladies and gentlemen,’ says the newsreader MC. ‘One single award winner truly deserving of our inaugural Queensland Senior Champion Award.’

I’m squeezing past the knees of the long-suffering six people sitting next to us in Row M. August waits in the central aisle.

I’m gesturing to Mum that we need to go. Throwing thumbs over my shoulder, pointing at August. I reach my seat.

‘We need to go, guys,’ I say.

‘Don’t be so rude, Eli,’ Mum says. ‘We’ll stay for the last award.’

I put a hand on Mum’s shoulder. Serious face. Never more serious face.

‘Please, Mum,’ I say. ‘You don’t want to see this one.’

And the Channel Seven newsreader joyfully calls the inaugural Queensland Senior Champion to the stage.

‘Tytus Broz,’ she sings.

Mum’s eyes turn from me to the stage and it takes a moment to connect the name with the figure in the white suit moving slowly onto the stage to accept his award.

She stands. She says nothing. She moves.

*

‘What’s the bloody rush?’ Dad asks as we reach the grand entry doors of Brisbane City Hall.

But his train of thought is derailed by the flashing lights of two police cars on the paved King George Square, the cars parked in a V-shape blocking in Caitlyn’s Ford Meteor.

Maybe ten sky-blue-uniformed police officers walking towards us. Two more police officers carefully assisting Bevan Penn to the back of a police car. Bevan’s gaze finds me in the chaos. He nods. Appreciation in that nod. Confusion. Survival. Silence.

‘What the fuck’s goin’ on ’ere?’ Dad ponders aloud.

Caitlyn Spies walks among the police officers. She leads them, in fact. Spies digs deep. She enters the hall foyer and points through the doors of the auditorium.

‘He’s already up there,’ she says. ‘That’s him in the white.’

The police officers file into the auditorium.

‘What’s going on, Eli?’ Mum asks.

Our eyes follow the police officers as they assume positions throughout the auditorium waiting for Tytus Broz to finish a long and self-inflating speech about the past four decades he has dedicated to Queensland’s disabled community.

‘It’s the end of Tytus Broz, Mum,’ I say.

Caitlyn walks over to me.

‘You okay?’ she asks.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘You okay?’

‘Yeah, they’ve sent three police cars to the Bellbowrie house.’

Caitlyn turns her eyes to Mum and Dad; they’re watching this scene like it was a moon landing.

‘Hi,’ Caitlyn says.

‘This is my mum, Frances,’ I say. ‘My dad, Robert. My brother, Gus.’

‘I’m Caitlyn,’ she says.

Mum shakes Caitlyn’s hand. Dad and Gus smile.

‘So you’re the one he’s always talking about?’ Mum says.

‘Mum,’ I say, short and sharp.

Mum’s looking at Caitlyn, smiling.

‘Eli says you’re a very special woman,’ she says.

I roll my eyes.

‘Well,’ Caitlyn replies, ‘I think I’m only just starting to realise how special your boys are, Mrs Bell.’

Mrs Bell. I don’t hear that much. Mum likes it as much as I do.

Caitlyn turns her eyes to the auditorium. Tytus Broz is still talking on stage. He’s talking about selflessness and making the most of the time we have on earth. We can’t see his face from here because there are too many people gathered in the foyer before the auditorium doors.

‘Keep pushing,’ Tytus says. ‘Never give up. Whatever you want to achieve. Keep going. Never waste a single opportunity to transform your wildest dreams into your favourite memories.’

He coughs. Clears his throat.

‘I have a surprise for you all tonight,’ Tytus Broz announces grandly. ‘The sum of my life’s work. A vision for the future. A future where young Australians who are not blessed with all the gifts of our glorious God are, instead, blessed by the gift of human ingenuity.’

He pauses.

‘Samantha, if you will be so kind.’

Perspective, Slim. Infinite angles on a single moment. Maybe there are five hundred people in this auditorium and each person views this moment from their own individual perspective. I view it in my mind because my eyes can only see Caitlyn. We can’t see the stage from where we stand but we can hear the sound of the audience as it reacts to Samantha Bruce removing the red silk cloth on Tytus’s glass display box holding his life’s work. We can hear the horrified gasps of the audience that ripple from Row A all the way to Row Z. People howling. A woman wailing. Men screaming in shock and outrage.

‘What’s happening, Eli?’ Mum asks.

I turn to her.

‘I found him, Mum.’

‘Found who?’

I can see the police officers rushing down the central aisle now. Other officers close in around Tytus Broz from the east and west sides of the auditorium. August and I share a glance at each other. Your end is a dead blue wren. Your end is a dead blue wren.

I see it all unfolding in my mind’s eye from the perspective of the people still sitting in Row M.

Captain Ahab is drowning in a sea of Queensland Police. The sky-blue cops dragging Tytus Broz away, taking his old and frail arms by the sleeves of his white suit. Placing those arms around his back. Audience members shielding their eyes with their cupped hands; women in cocktail dresses gagging and screaming. Tytus Broz dragged from the stage as he looks, looks, looks in befuddlement at the glass box on stage, wondering how in the world and in this puzzling universe his life’s-work silicone super limb was replaced with the warped and macabre and plastinated severed head of the first man I ever loved.

*

Time, Slim. Do your time before it does you. It slows now. Everybody moves in slow motion and I’m not sure if I’m making them do it. The police lights, flashing red and blue and silent. That slow and deliberate nod of August’s that says he’s proud of me. That says he knew it was going to happen exactly like this. That it was going to all unfold in this busy City Hall foyer, with people rushing to leave the building, clutching their purses and umbrellas and tripping over their long evening dresses. Important men barking their dismay and trauma at event organisers. The woman with the evil eye in tears, overwhelmed by the pandemonium caused by that severed head on stage. August’s knowing smile and his right forefinger pen writing me a message in the air.

August walks away, shuffles elegantly and calmly towards Mum and Dad, standing to the side of the hall’s entry doors. They’re giving me some space. They’re giving me some time. Time with the girl of my dreams. She stands before me, a metre from me, police and audience members and officials zipping back and forth around the bubble of us.

‘What just happened?’ Caitlyn asks.

‘I don’t know,’ I shrug. ‘It all happened too fast.’

Caitlyn shakes her head.

‘Were you really talking to someone on that telephone?’ she asks.

I think about this for a long moment.

‘I don’t know any more. Do you think I was?’

She stares into my eyes.

‘I need to think on that some more,’ she says. She nods to a huddle of police officers.

‘Cops want us down at Roma Street police station,’ she says. ‘You wanna come with me?’

‘Mum and Dad are gonna drive me down,’ I say.

She looks out from the foyer to Mum, Dad and August, now waiting at the edge of King George Square.

‘I thought they’d look different, your mum and dad,’ she says.

I laugh. ‘You did?’

‘They’re so nice,’ she says. ‘They just look like any normal mum and dad.’

‘They’ve been working on normal for quite some time now.’

Caitlyn nods. Hands in her pockets. She bounces on her heels. I want to say something else to stay in this moment, freeze it, but I can only slow time, I can’t stop it yet.

‘Brian’s gonna want me to write all this up tomorrow,’ Caitlyn says. ‘What do you think I should say to him?’

‘You should say you’ll write it, every last bit of it,’ I say. ‘The truth. All of it.’

‘No fear,’ she says.

‘No favour,’ I say.

‘You want to write it with me?’ she asks.

‘But I’m not a crime writer.’

‘Not yet,’ she says. ‘Joint byline?’

Joint byline with Caitlyn Spies. Dream stuff. A story in three words.

‘Caitlyn and Eli,’ I say.

She smiles.

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Caitlyn and Eli.’

Caitlyn shuffles back towards the huddle of police. I walk to the entry doors of the auditorium. The space is almost empty of people. A police forensics officer is on stage carefully inspecting Tytus Broz’s glass box, now with the red silk cloth covering it. I look up to the moon-shaped white ceiling, like four white beach shells, four quarters of a circle coming together to form a whole moon. I see the beginning in that ceiling and I see the end. I see my brother, August, sitting on the fence in front of the Darra house, the full sun behind him, writing those air words that have followed me through my short life: Your end is a dead blue wren.

*

I turn away from the auditorium and walk towards the front hall exit but a figure stands before me. Tall and lean and old and strong. I see the figure’s shoes first, black leather dress shoes, unpolished and worn. Black dress slacks. A blue button-up shirt with no tie and an old wrinkled black jacket. I see the face of Iwan Krol and it’s the face of death. But my spine knows him first and so do the teenage bones in my calves and they help me move. I spring sharply away but not sharp enough to miss the blade hidden in his right fist that stabs into the right side of my belly. It feels like a tear. Like someone tore open my belly and stuck a finger inside, wiggled it around like it was searching for something I shouldn’t have swallowed. Something I swallowed long ago, like the universe. I stagger groggily backwards, staring at Iwan Krol as though I still can’t believe he would do such a thing. That he could be so cold, despite everything I know about him, despite everything I’ve seen. That he could stab a young man on a night like this, this electric night when Caitlyn and Eli saw the future and they saw the past and they smiled at them both. I’m dizzy and my mouth is suddenly dry and it takes me a moment to realise Iwan Krol is coming towards me for a second blow, a final blow. I can’t even see the blade he stabbed me with. He’s hiding it somewhere. In his sleeve, maybe. In his pockets. Run, Eli. Run. But I can’t run. The wound in my belly makes me keel over in agony. I try to scream but I can’t because screaming uses the muscles in my gut and my gut muscles have been stabbed deep. All I do is stagger. Stagger left. Stagger away from Iwan Krol. And I pray to be seen by police gathering beyond the hall doors but they have not seen me in the movement of the audience members gathered in the foyer, discussing the horror of the severed head while missing the horror of the boy and the blade-wielding beast unfolding among them. Iwan Krol got me with a perfect prison yard stabbing, an accomplished porridge shiv. Quick and quiet. No big scenes.

My right hand grips my belly and I see it painted in blood. Stagger to the staircase to my left. A grand marble and wood staircase sweeping in an arc to the hall’s second floor. I pull myself up each step and Iwan Krol staggers behind me, dragging his severed left foot, evidently bandaged now and stuffed agonisingly into a black leather shoe. Two cripples playing cat and mouse, one more accustomed to physical pain than the other. The word is ‘help’, Eli. Say it loud. Just say it. ‘H . . .’ But I can’t get it out. ‘Hel . . .’ The wound won’t let me scream it. Three audience members descend the stairs from the second floor, a suited man and two women in cocktail dresses, one wearing a fluffy white scarf like she’s shouldering a white wolf. I burst through them, clutching my stomach. They see the blood now over my hands and across the shirt beneath the old black jacket I took from the newsroom’s emergency coat rack.

‘Help!’ I say, loud enough for them to hear.

The woman wearing the white scarf howls in fear, reels away from me like I’m on fire or diseased.

‘He’s . . . knife,’ I spit at the man in the descending trio and this man makes a dot-to-dot connection between my bloodstained belly and the man waddling after me with the look on his face like a thousand fires from a thousand hells.

‘Hey, stop,’ demands the suited man, bravely standing in front of Iwan Krol who promptly stabs the brave suited man in the top of his right shoulder with a lightning-swift and masked downward stabbing motion that leaves the man collapsed instantly on the marble staircase.

‘Harold!’ howls the woman in the white scarf. The other woman in the trio banshee-screams then runs down the stairs and across the foyer in the direction of the gathered police officers. I stagger on, reach the top of the stairs and turn a sharp right into a hall space and I burst through a nameless brown solid wood door and then another hall space that curves around through sky-blue walls for twenty metres and I look behind me to see the drops of blood I’m leaving in my wake, blood crumbs for the beast whose rabid old-man wheezing tells me he’s slower than me but hungrier. I burst through another nameless door – no people, nobody around to save the boy – and this door opens to a staircase zig-zagging up to another level still and I know this level. I know this white wall space and I know this elevator. I know this, Slim. This is the room from my youth. This is the room where we met the maintenance man who showed us how the city clocks work and how the clock faces look from the inside out.

I stagger to the old yellow steel clock tower elevator and I try to open the cage door but it’s locked and I can hear Iwan Krol bursting through the doors behind me, so I stagger to the door of the maintenance stairs. Your friend Clancy Mallett’s secret stairs, Slim, the ones he showed us years ago, around the corner and through the door running off the elevator room.

Total darkness in the secret stairwell. I’m fading now. I can’t breathe right. My belly doesn’t even hurt so acutely any more because my whole body aches. Numb now. But still moving. Up and up and up the secret stairs. These concrete stairs zigzag upward, eight or nine steps going up sharply, then I bang into a wall I can’t see, then I turn and step up eight or nine more steps, then I bang into another wall hard and turn and go up another eight or nine steps. I’ll do this until I drop, Slim. Just keep going up. But then I stop because I want to lie down on these steps and close my eyes but maybe that’s called dying and I don’t want to do that, Slim, not when there’s so many more questions to ask Caitlyn Spies, so many more questions to ask my mum and dad about how they fell in love, how I came to be; about August and the moon pool and all those things they were gonna tell me when I was older. I’ve got to get older. My eyes close briefly. Black. Black. The long black. Then my eyes open because I hear the door to the secret stairs open below me, a shaft of yellow light flooding the entry then vanishing as the door closes. Move, Eli Bell. Move. Get up. I can hear Iwan Krol below me, wheezing and sucking in the dank stairwell air. His crippled psycho legs and his crooked heart driving him up the stairs in search of my neck and my eyes and my heart, all of which he wants to stab. Frankenstein’s monster. Tytus’s monster. I drag myself up another cramped flight of stairs, then another, then another. The woman with the white fox around her neck. She screamed on the curved staircase. She bellowed so loud the police had to hear her. Keep walking, Eli. Keep going. Ten flights of stairs. I’m ready to sleep now, Slim. Eleven flights of stairs. Twelve. I’m ready to die now, Slim. Thirteen.

And then a wall with no more stairs zig-zagging up. Just a thin door with a handle for turning. The light. The room with the lights that shine at night through the four clock faces of the Brisbane City Hall clock tower. The north clock. The south clock. East and west. Illuminated from here for the city of Brisbane. The sound of the clockwork. The machinery of the clockwork. Rotating wheels and pulleys working into themselves, not beginning at any point but not ending at any point either. Perpetual. A polished concrete floor and a caged elevator shaft in the centre of the engine room. Four grand ticking clock faces on each side of the tower, engines at the base of each clock encased in protective metal.

Both hands clutching my stomach now, I stagger along the square concrete path around the elevator shaft, past the east clock face, blood dripping on my shoes and on the concrete, past the south clock face and the west clock face. Eyes closing. So thirsty. So tired. Eyes closing. I come to the north clock face and there’s nowhere else to go, the concrete path ends here, blocked by a tall wire protection gate giving access to the elevator. I fall to the ground, push myself up so I’m leaning against the metal casing of the engine that pushes the long black steel minute and hour hands of the north clock face. The minute hand moves up a notch and, cupping my stomach, holding my hands over the blade wound to stop the bleeding, I mark the time on the clock from the inside out. Time of death. Two minutes to nine o’clock.

I hear the door to the engine room open and close again. I hear Iwan Krol’s footsteps. One foot steps and the other foot drags. And I see him now through the wires and steel beams of the elevator cage. He’s on one side of the engine room and I’m on the other. The elevator shaft between us. I just want to sleep. I’m so lifeless now he doesn’t even scare me any more. I’m not afraid of him. I’m angry. I’m furious. I’m vengeful. But I can only channel that rage into my heart, nothing else. Not my hands to pull myself up or my legs to stand.

He limps past the east clock face and the south and the west and turns a corner into my path, my body spread out before the north clock face, my useless punctured flesh and my weak bones without any marrow.

He limps closer now. All I hear is his wheezing and his left shoe dragging along the concrete. Up close he seems so old. I see his wrinkles, the lines in his forehead like dry desert gullies. His face is covered in farming sunspots. Half his nose has been cut away surgically. How could he be so filled with hate at such an old age?

He steps closer. One step, drag. Two steps, drag. Three steps, drag. And he stops.

He stands over me now, studies me like I’m a dead dog. A dead bird. A dead blue wren. He kneels down, placing his weight on his right foot, relieving the pressure on his cut left foot. Then he prods me. He feels for a pulse in my neck. He spreads open the flaps of my black jacket to study the wound in my belly clearly. He lifts my shirt up to study the wound. He pushes my shoulder. He squeezes my upper left arm in his hands. He’s squeezing my left bicep. He’s feeling my bones.

I want to ask him what he is doing but I’m too spent to speak. I want to ask him if he thinks he’s a good man but my lips don’t move. I want to ask him what moment in his life preceded his heart turning so cold and mechanised and his mind so mad. Then his hands return to my neck and he’s feeling the bones in my neck and his forefinger and thumb squeeze my Adam’s apple. Then he cleans his knife on my pants, wipes each side of it. And he breathes deep and I can feel his breath on my face. And he brings his clean blade to my neck.

Then the door to the engine room opens. Three police officers in sky-blue uniforms. They scream things.

My eyes closing. The police screaming.

‘Step back.’

‘Step back.’

‘Drop the knife.’

The cold blade on my neck.

An explosion. A gunshot. Two gunshots. Bullets bouncing on metal and concrete.

The knife momentarily released from my neck and I’m standing now, hauled to my feet by Iwan Krol. My vision blurs. I know he stands behind me and I know his blade is touching my Adam’s apple now and I know those shirts are blue in front of me. Men in blue with weapons raised.

‘You know I’ll do it,’ he says.

Then go ahead, I cannot say, I’m already dead. My end was a dead blue wren.

He pushes me forward and my legs move with him. And the movement of feet moves my jacket and something inside my jacket moves. I reach inside my jacket pocket with the four fingers of my right hand gripping something made of glass. Something cylindrical. A jar.

‘Back,’ Iwan Krol bellows. ‘Get back.’

The blade presses hard against my throat. We’re so close together I feel his breath and his spit in my earhole. And we stop because the police can’t go back any further.

‘Put the knife down,’ one officer says, trying to calm things. ‘Don’t do this.’

Time stops, Slim. Time does not exist. It is frozen in this moment.

Then it starts again because it is given something human to understand it, something we built to remind us of ageing, a deafening bell that chimes above us. A bell I did not see above me when I entered this engine room. A bell tolling nine times. Clang. Clang. Clang. The sound clogs our eardrums. Stifles our minds. And temporarily clouds Iwan Krol’s sense of awareness because he does not defend himself from the glass specimen jar holding my severed forefinger which I smash against his right side temple. He reels back and the knife is momentarily lifted from my neck, long enough for me to drop to the ground hard, a dead weight drop, landing on my arse and rolling over like a party-trick dog playing dead.

I don’t see where the bullets go from the guns of the officers. Just my perspective through a dead man’s eyes. That’s my perspective on this moment, Slim. Face flat on concrete. The world turned on its side. The black polished shoes of police officers moving to something behind me. A figure running through the door to the engine room. A face leaning down into my view.

My brother, August. My eyes are closing. Blink. My brother, August. Blink.

He whispers in my right ear.

‘You’re gonna be okay, Eli,’ he says. ‘You’re gonna be okay. You come back. You always come back.’

I can’t speak. My mouth won’t let me speak. I’m mute. My left forefinger scribbles a line in the air only my older brother will read before the line disappears.

Boy swallows universe.