The magic car. The magic flying Holden Kingswood. The magic sky, light blues and pinks, outside the window. A cloud so fluffy and big and misshapen it’s a prime candidate for August’s game of ‘What’s that one look like to you?’
‘That’s an elephant,’ I say. ‘There’s the big ears, left and right, and the trunk going down the middle.’
‘Nah,’ he says, because he talks in the magic car dream. ‘That’s an axe. There’s the blades, left and right, and the axe handle going down the middle.’
The car turns in the sky and we roll along the tan vinyl back seat.
‘Why are we flying?’ I ask.
‘We always fly,’ August says. ‘But don’t worry, it won’t last long.’
The car dips sharply in the air and takes a leftward arcing drop through the clouds.
I look into the car’s rearview mirror. The deep blue eyes of Robert Bell. The deep blue eyes of my father.
‘I don’t want to be here any more, Gus,’ I say, the force of the plummeting car pushing us back hard against our seats.
‘I know,’ he says. ‘But we always end up here. No matter what I do. It makes no difference.’
There’s water below us. But this is like no water I’ve seen. This water is silver and it glows, throbbing with silver light.
‘What is that?’ I ask.
‘It’s the moon,’ says August.
The car slams into the glowing silver surface and the surface breaks into liquid as the car plunges into the suffocating green of a world beneath the sea. The magic Holden Kingswood fills with water and bubbles flow from our mouths as we stare at each other. August isn’t bothered about being underwater like this, not phased in the slightest. He lifts his right hand and points his right forefinger out and slowly writes three words in the water.
Boy swallows universe.
And I raise my right hand up because I want to write something back and I go to extend my right forefinger but it’s not there any more, just a blood-filled knuckle hole leaking red blood into the sea. I scream. Then the redness. Then the blackness.
*
I wake. Blurred vision focusing into a white hospital room. The throbbing pain in my right hand sharpens everything. Everything inside me, all my cells and all my blood molecules, rushing and then smashing against the dam wall of the heavily bandaged and taped forefinger knuckle that once connected to my lucky forefinger with the lucky freckle. But wait, the pain isn’t so bad now. There’s a warm feeling in my belly. A floaty feeling, something fuzzy and giddy and cosy.
A liquid drip pulses from the centre of the top of my left hand. So thirsty. So sick. So surreal here. A hard hospital bed and a blanket over me and the smell of antiseptic. A curtain that looks like Lena’s old olive green bedsheets is connected to a U-shaped rod surrounding the hospital bed. The ceiling is made up of square tiles with hundreds of tiny holes in them. A man sitting on my right in a chair. A tall man. A slender man. A slim man.
‘Slim.’
‘How you doin’, kid?’
‘Water,’ I say.
‘Yeah, matey,’ he says.
He takes a white plastic cup from a trolley beside my bed, puts the cup to my lips.
I drink the whole cup. He pours me another and I drink that one too and lean back, weak and exhausted by the small effort. I look again at my missing finger. A right thumb, a bandaged knuckle and three other fingers sticking from my hand like an uneven cactus.
‘I’m sorry, kid,’ Slim says. ‘It’s gone.’
‘It’s not gone,’ I say. ‘Tytus Broz . . .’
Movement makes my hand throb in agony. Slim nods.
‘I know, Eli,’ he says. ‘Just lie back.’
‘Where am I?’
‘Royal Brisbane.’
‘Where’s Mum?’ I ask.
‘She’s with the cops,’ Slim says. He drops his head. ‘You won’t be seeing her for a while, Eli.’
‘Why?’ I ask. And the tears inside me rush to my eyes the way the blood inside me is rushing to the nub of my forefinger, but there’s no dam stopping the tears and they pour out of me. ‘What happened?’
Slim moves his chair closer to the bed. He stares at me silently.
‘You know what happened,’ he says. ‘And any minute now a woman named Dr Brennan will come in here and she’ll want to know what happened too. And you need to decide what you want to tell her because she will believe you. She does not believe what the ambulance officers told her, which is what your mother told them moments before the police arrived.’
‘What did she tell them?’
‘She told them you and August were horsing around with an axe. She told them you were holding one of your Star Wars figurines against a log and you asked August to chop it in half and he chopped Darth Vader in two, along with your finger.’
‘An axe?’ I say. ‘I was just dreaming about an axe. A cloud that looked like an axe. It felt so clear it could have been a memory.’
‘They’re the only dreams worth having, the ones you remember,’ Slim says.
‘What did August tell the cops?’
‘The same he says about anything,’ Slim says. ‘Sweet fuck all.’
‘Why’d they take Lyle away, Slim?’ I ask.
Slim sighs. ‘Forget about that, mate.’
‘Why, Slim?’
Slim takes a deep breath.
‘He was making his own side deals with Bich Dang,’ he says.
‘Side deals?’
‘He was operatin’ behind the boss’s back, kid,’ Slim says. ‘He was building towards something. He had a whole plan.’
‘What plan?’
‘He was going to get out. He called it the “nest egg”. Slowly build your stash, sit on it for a year or two. Let time and the market double its value. Somehow Tytus got wind of it and reacted as expected. He’s now severed ties with Bich Dang. He’ll use Dustin Vang now as his supplier. And when Bich Dang finds out about Lyle it’s gonna be World War III in the streets of Darra.’
Nest egg. World War III. Find out about Lyle. Fuck.
‘Fuck,’ I say.
‘Don’t fuckin’ swear.’
I weep, drag the right sleeve of my hospital gown across my eyes.
‘What is it, Eli?’
‘It’s my fault,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘It was my idea, Slim. I told him about the market. I told him about supply and demand, what we talked about, you know, Taskforce Janus ’n’ that.’
Slim pulls his White Ox from a top shirt pocket, rolls a cigarette that he’ll keep in his packet and light as soon as he exits the hospital. This is how I know Slim is anxious, by his rolling a cigarette he cannot light.
‘When did you tell him that?’ Slim asks.
‘Few months ago,’ I say.
‘Well, he’s been doin’ it for six months, kid, so it sure as shit ain’t your fault.’
‘But . . . that’s . . . impossible . . . He lied to me.’
Lyle lied to me. The man who said he couldn’t lie. He lied to me.
‘There’s a big difference between lying to a kid and not telling him something for his own good,’ Slim says.
‘What did they do with him, Slim?’
He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know, mate,’ he says, tender. ‘I don’t want to know and maybe you shouldn’t either.’
‘There’s no difference between lying and not telling, Slim,’ I say. ‘They’re both weak as piss.’
‘Careful,’ warns Slim.
Maybe it’s the pain in the knuckle where my finger once was that’s putting this rage in me, or maybe it’s the memory of Mum knocked out in Lena and Aureli Orlik’s hallway.
‘They’re monsters, Slim. They’re fucking psychopaths running the suburbs. I’m gonna tell ’em everything. I’m gonna tell ’em every bit of it. Iwan Krol and all the bodies he’s cut up. How saintly Tytus Broz and “Back Off” Bich Dang and fucking Dustin Vang supply half the heroin across Brisbane’s west. They came into our house while we were eatin’ spaghetti and they took Lyle away. They just took him away from us, Slim.’
I sit up on my right elbow to get closer to Slim and a sharp pain localises around my knuckles.
‘You gotta tell me, Slim,’ I say. ‘Where were they taking him?’
Slim shakes his head. ‘I don’t know, kid, but you can’t be thinking about that now. You need to be thinking very carefully about what reasons your mother had for making up that story. She’s protecting you boys, mate. She’ll swallow that shit for you two and you’ll swallow that shit for her.’
My left hand on my forehead. I rub my eyes, wipe tears from my eyes. I’m dizzy. Confused. I want to get out. I want to play Missile Command on Atari. I want to stare for ten minutes at Jane Seymour in Mum’s Women’s Weekly. I want to pick my fucking nose with my lucky fucking forefinger.
‘Where’s August?’ I ask.
‘The cops took him to your father’s house.’
‘What?’
‘He’s your guardian now, mate,’ Slim says. ‘He’ll look after you boys now.’
‘I’m not going to his house.’
‘It’s the only place you can go, kid.’
‘I could stay with you.’
‘You can’t stay with me, kid.’
‘Why not?’
This is Slim losing patience. It’s not loud what he says but it’s pointed.
‘Because you’re not my fucking kid, mate.’
Unplanned. Unwished. Unwilled. Untested. Underdeveloped. Undernourished. Undone. Unwanted. Unloved. Undead. Shoulda coulda woulda never been here in the first place if that creep hadn’t dragged Mum into his car way back in the way back when. If she hadn’t run away from home. If her old man hadn’t run away from her.
I see my mum’s dad in my head and he looks like Tytus Broz. I see the creep who tried to drag Mum into his car and he looks like Tytus Broz with thirty years shaved off that zombie face, a switchblade knife for a tongue. I see my father and I can’t remember what his face looks like, so he looks like Tytus Broz too.
Slim drops his head. Breathes. I lay my head back in tears on the pillow, staring up at the square tiles. I’m counting the holes in the ceiling tiles starting from the left. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . .
‘Look, Eli, you’re in the hole,’ he says. ‘You know what I mean. This is a low. But it only goes up, mate. This is your Black Peter. It only goes up, mate.’
I keep staring at the ceiling. I have a question.
‘Are you a good man, Slim?’
Slim is puzzled by this.
‘Why you askin’ that for?’
Tears spill from my eyes, run down across my temples.
‘Are you a good man?’
‘Yeah,’ Slim says.
I turn my head towards him. He’s looking out my room window. Blue sky and cloud.
‘I’m a good man,’ Slim says. ‘But I’m a bad man too. And that’s like all men, kid. We all got a bit o’ good and a bit o’ bad in us. The tricky part is learnin’ how to be good all the time and bad none of the time. Some of us get that right. Most of us don’t.’
‘Is Lyle a good man?’
‘Yeah, Eli,’ he says. ‘He’s a good man. Some of the time.’
‘Slim . . .’
‘Yeah, kid.’
‘Do you think I’m good?’
Slim nods.
‘Yeah, kid, you’re all right.’
‘But am I good?’ I ask. ‘Do you think I’m gonna be a good man when I grow up?’
Slim shrugs. ‘Well, you’re a good boy,’ he says. ‘But I guess bein’ a good boy doesn’t guarantee bein’ a good man.’
‘I think I need to be tested,’ I say.
‘Whaddya mean?’
‘I need to be tested. A test of character. I don’t know what’s inside me, Slim.’
Slim stands up and looks at the writing on my drip bag.
‘I think they souped you up on some wacky juice, mate,’ Slim says, sitting back down again.
‘I do feel good,’ I say. ‘I feel like I’m still in a dream.’
‘That’s the painkillers, mate,’ Slim says. ‘Why do you need to be tested? Why don’t you just know that you’re a good kid? You got a good heart.’
‘I don’t know that,’ I say. ‘I’m not certain of that. I’ve thought some horrible things. I’ve had some very evil thoughts that couldn’t be the thoughts of someone good.’
‘Thinking evil thoughts and doing evil deeds are two very different things,’ Slim says.
‘Sometimes I imagine two aliens coming to planet earth and they have faces like piranhas and they drag me away in their spaceship and we’re flying through space as earth comes into view in the spaceship’s rearview mirror and one of the aliens turns to me from their driver’s seat and says, “It’s time, Eli”, and I take one last look at earth and I say, “Do it”, and the other alien presses a red button and in the rearview mirror earth doesn’t explode like it was the Death Star blowing up, it just silently vanishes from space – it’s there, then not there, like it was just deleted from the universe more than destroyed.’
Slim nods.
‘Sometimes, Slim, I wonder if you’re not an actor and Mum is too, and Lyle as well and Gus, oh man, Gus, he’s like the best actor who ever lived, and you guys are all just acting around me and I’m being watched by those aliens in some grand production of my life.’
‘That’s not evil,’ Slim says. ‘That’s just batshit crazy, and a little self-centred.’
‘I need a test,’ I say. ‘Some moment where my true character can reveal itself naturally. I could do something noble, without a second’s thought, I just do it because doing good things is in me, and I’ll know for certain then that I am truly good inside.’
‘We all get that test eventually, kid,’ Slim says, looking out the window. ‘You can do something good every single day, kid. And you know what today’s good deed is going to be?’
‘What?’
‘Backin’ up your mother’s version of events,’ Slim says.
‘And what were they again?’
‘August chopped your finger off with an axe,’ he says.
‘Gus is good,’ I say. ‘I don’t remember a single time when he did something bad against someone who didn’t deserve it.’
‘Them rules of good and bad don’t apply to that boy, I’m afraid,’ he says. ‘He’s walkin’ a different path, I reckon.’
‘Where to, ya reckon?’
‘Dunno,’ Slim says. ‘Some place only Gus knows how to get to.’
‘He talked, Slim,’ I say.
‘Who talked?’
‘Gus,’ I say. ‘Just before I blacked out. He talked.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said—’
A woman pulls the olive green curtain along the U-shaped rod. She wears a blue woollen jumper with an image of a kookaburra resting on a branch beside a gum leaf. She wears dark green slacks the colour of the gum leaf on the jumper. Her hair is red and she’s pale, late fifties maybe. She’s looking at my eyes the second she pulls back the curtain. She carries a clipboard. She swings the curtain back for privacy.
‘How’s our brave young soldier?’ she asks.
She has an Irish accent. I’ve never in person heard a woman speak with an Irish accent.
‘He’s doing good,’ Slim says.
‘Well, let’s have a look at that dressing,’ she says.
I love her Irish accent. I want to go to Ireland right now with this woman and lie in rich green grass by a cliff’s edge and eat boiled potatoes with salt and butter and pepper and speak with an Irish accent about how anything is possible for thirteen-year-old boys with Irish accents.
‘My name is Caroline Brennan,’ she says. ‘And you must be brave Eli, the young man who lost his special finger.’
‘How did you know it was special?’
‘Well, the right forefinger is always special,’ she says. ‘It’s the one you use to point at the stars. It’s the one you use to point out the girl in your class photo who you secretly love. It’s the one you use to read a really long word in your favourite book. It’s the one you use to pick your nose and scratch your arse, right?’
Dr Brennan says the surgeons upstairs couldn’t do much about my missing finger. She says modern reattachment surgeries in teenagers are roughly seventy to eighty per cent successful but these complex reattachments rely heavily on one key element: a fucking finger to stick back on. After twelve or so hours without replantation of the amputated finger, that seventy to eighty per cent success rate bottoms out to ‘Sorry, you poor rotten son of a smack dealer.’ Sometimes, she says, finger replantations often cause more problems than they’re worth, especially when the lone severed finger is an index or pinkie finger, but this just sounds to me like saying to a starving man floating out at sea on a plank of wood, ‘Look, it’s probably a good thing you don’t have a leg of ham with you because it probably would make you constipated.’
Amputations like mine, she says, at the base of the finger, are more complex still, and even if my teenage runaway finger suddenly emerged on a bucket of ice, it is unlikely nerve function would recover enough to make the finger anything more useful than something I could shove into a bed of hot coals as a neat party trick.
‘Now hold out your tall man,’ she says, twiddling her middle finger.
I hold up my tall man.
‘Now shove him up your nostril,’ she says.
She sticks her own middle finger in her nostril, raising her eyebrows.
Slim beams. I follow suit, shove that tall man up my nose.
‘See,’ Dr Brennan says. ‘There ain’t nothing that forefinger could do that tall man can’t, you hear me, young Eli? The tall man can just go deeper.’
I nod, smiling.
She carefully unwraps the dressing around my fingerless knuckle and the air on the exposed flesh makes me wince. I sneak a look at it and turn immediately away with the image of a bald white knuckle bone exposed in flesh, like one of my back teeth lodged inside a pork sausage.
‘It’s healing well,’ she says.
‘How long will he be in for, Doc,’ Slim asks.
‘I’d like to keep him here two or three more days at least,’ she says. ‘Just monitor him for infection in the early stages.’
She gives the wound a new dressing. She turns to Slim.
‘Can I speak to Eli alone, please?’ she says.
Slim nods. He stands, his old bones cracking as he rises. He coughs twice, a chesty, nasty, wheezy cough like he’s got a hissing rhinoceros beetle lodged in his larynx.
‘You had that cough seen to?’ Dr Brennan asks.
‘Nah,’ Slim says.
‘Why not?’ she replies.
‘Because one of you bright quacks might do something silly like stop me from dyin’,’ he says. He gives me a wink as he passes Dr Brennan.
‘Has Eli got a place to go?’ Dr Brennan asks.
‘He’s going to his dad’s house,’ Slim says.
Dr Brennan shoots a look at me.
‘Is that okay with you?’ she asks.
Slim watches for my response.
I nod. And he nods too.
He hands me a $20 note. ‘When you’re done ’ere, you get yourself a cab back to your old man’s, all right?’ he says. He points to a cupboard beneath my hospital bed. ‘I brought your shoes and a fresh set of clothes for ya.’
Slim hands me a slip of paper and walks for the door. An address and a phone number on the paper.
‘Your old man’s address,’ he says. ‘I’m not far from you boys, just past the Hornibrook Bridge. You call this number if you need me. It’s the number of a hock shop beneath the flat. Ask for Gill.’
‘Then what do I say?’ I ask.
‘Say you’re best friends with Slim Halliday.’
Then he’s gone.
*
Dr Brennan reads a chart on a clipboard. She sits on the side of the bed.
‘Give me your arm,’ she says. Around my left bicep she wraps a velvet cuff attached to a black pump shaped like a grenade.
‘What’s that?’
‘Checks your blood pressure,’ she says. ‘Just relax now.’
She squeezes the grenade several times.
‘So, you like Star Wars?’
I nod.
‘So do I,’ she says. ‘Who’s your favourite character?’
‘Han. Boba Fett, maybe.’ A long pause. ‘No, Han.’
Dr Brennan gives me a sharp eye.
‘You sure about that?’
Pause.
‘Luke,’ I say. ‘It’s always been Luke. Who’s yours?’
‘Oh, Darth Vader all the way for me,’ she says.
I see where she’s going with this. Dr Brennan should join the fuzz. I’ll bite.
‘You like Vader?’
‘Oh yeah, I always enjoy the bad guys,’ she says. ‘You don’t have much of a story if you don’t have some bad guys. Can’t have a good, good hero without a bad, bad villain, right?’
I smile.
‘Who doesn’t want to be Darth Vader?’ she laughs. ‘Someone pushes in front of you when you’re lining up for a hot dog and you give them the ol’ silent Force choke.’ She makes a pincer grip with her thumb and forefinger.
I laugh, making the same grip in midair. ‘I find your lack of mustard disturbing,’ I say and we laugh together.
Out of the corner of my eye I catch sight of a boy standing in the doorway of my hospital room. He wears a light blue hospital gown like me. He has a shaved head but for a long brown rat’s tail stretching from the back of his scalp and draping over his right shoulder. His left hand grips a mobile IV stand holding the drip bag that’s plugged into his hand.
‘What is it, Christopher?’ asks Dr Brennan.
Maybe he’s eleven years old. He’s got a scar across his top lip that makes him look like the last eleven-year-old boy with a mobile drip I’d ever want to come across in a dark alley. He scratches his arse.
‘Tang’s too weak again,’ he spits.
Dr Brennan sighs. ‘Christopher, there’s twice as much powder in it than last time,’ she says.
He shakes his head and walks away.
‘I’m fuckin’ dyin’ and yer givin’ me weak Tang?’ he says on his way up the corridor outside.
Dr Brennan raises her eyebrows. ‘Sorry about that,’ she says.
‘What’s he dying from?’ I ask.
‘Poor bugger’s got a tumour the size of Ayers Rock in his brain,’ she says.
‘Can you do anything about it?’
‘Maybe,’ she says, writing my blood pressure numbers onto a sheet on the clipboard. ‘Maybe not. Sometimes medicine’s got nothing to do with it.’
‘What do you mean? . . . God?’
‘Oh, no, not God. I’m talkin’ about Gog.’
‘Who’s Gog?’
‘He’s God’s cranky, more impatient younger brother,’ she says. ‘While God’s off building the Himalayas, miserable ol’ Gog is off puttin’ tumours in the heads of young Brisbane lads.’
‘Gog’s got a lot to answer for,’ I suggest.
‘Gog walks among us,’ she says. ‘Anyway, where were we?’
‘Vader.’
‘Oh yeah, so you don’t like Darth Vader, do you?’ she says. ‘You and your brother wanted to chop him in half with an axe, I understand?’
‘We were pissed he killed Obi-Wan.’
She stares into my eyes, rests her folder on the bed.
‘You ever heard the saying, Eli, “Can’t bullshit a bullshitter”?’
‘Slim loves that one,’ I say.
‘I bet he does.’
‘I see some shit in this place,’ she says, her Irish accent making that sentence sound like she’s talking about a fine dawn sunrise. ‘I’ve seen green shit and yellow shit and black shit and purple shit with polka dots and shit so thick you could plop it over your mother-in-law’s head and fairly knock her out. I’ve seen shit come out of holes you didn’t know existed. I’ve seen shit tear the arseholes out of women and men, but rarely have I seen shit so dangerous as the bullshit pouring out of your mouth right now.’
She speaks with love and compassion in all that shit-speak and it makes me laugh.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘There are things you can do,’ she says. ‘There are places you can go to be safe, people you can trust. There are still people in this city more powerful than the police. There’s still a few Luke Skywalkers left in Brisbane, Eli.’
‘Heroes?’ I ask.
‘Can’t have all those villains walking around without a few heroes too,’ she says.
*
Dear Alex,
Greetings from the children’s ward of Royal Brisbane Hospital. Firstly, please forgive my messy handwriting. I recently lost my right forefinger (really long story) but I can grip a Bic ballpoint pen just fine between my tall finger, my thumb and my right ring finger. My doctor, Dr Brennan, wants me to start using my hands and she said writing a letter might be a way to start practising my writing as well as getting the blood circulating in my hands. How are you and the boys and Tripod the cat? Sorry I can’t give you any updates on Days of Our Lives, they only have one TV in the children’s ward and it’s always on Play School. You ever been in hospital? It’s not bad here. Dr Brennan is real nice and speaks with an Irish accent that I think the boys in 2 Division would love. Dinner’s a bit rough with the roast lamb but breakfast (Corn Flakes) and lunch (chicken sandwiches) are spot on. I could stay a bit longer here but I can’t because I’ve got work to do. See, I’ve been thinking about heroes, Alex. You ever have a hero? Someone who saved you. Someone who kept you safe. What makes someone a hero? Luke Skywalker didn’t set out to be a hero. He just wanted to find Obi-Wan. Then he just decided to step outside his comfort zone. He just decided to follow his heart. So maybe that’s all it takes to be a hero, Alex. Just follow your heart. Step outside. You might not be able to get hold of me for a while because I’m going away for a bit. I’m off on a quest, going on a bit of an adventure. I have established my goal and I have the will to achieve it. Remember what Slim always says about the four things: timing, planning, luck, belief. I reckon that’s like life. I reckon that’s like living. I’ll write to you when I can, but if you don’t hear from me for a bit, I want to say thanks for all the letters and thanks for being my friend. So much more to say but I’ll have to leave all that to another day because my moment is almost here and my time is slipping away. Like sand through the hourglass. Ha!
Your friend always,
Eli
*
Slim always had this self-belief thing about escaping prison. It went something along the lines of, ‘If you truly believe the guards can see you then the guards can truly see you. But if you truly believe that you’re invisible then the guards will believe you’re truly invisible.’ I think that’s what he was saying. It was something about confidence. The Houdini of Boggo Road wasn’t as magical as he was sneaky and confident and a confident sneak can make his own magic. His first successful escape from Boggo Road was in broad daylight. A blistering Sunday afternoon, 28 January 1940. Slim and his fellow D Wing prisoners were being walked around the central circle towards Number 4 yard. Slim fell back among the group and he believed he was invisible, so he was.
Four factors to a clean escape: timing, planning, luck, belief. Timing was right, between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. on a Sunday when the majority of the prison guards were off guarding the majority of prisoners at prayer service in Number 4 yard, on the opposite side of the compound to Slim’s D Wing. Simple plan. Effective plan. Confident plan. On the way to Number 4 yard, Slim simply went invisible, slipped like a ghost from the single line of prisoners and ducked into Number 1 yard, adjacent to D Wing, nearest yard to his ultimate destination, the prison workshops.
Then he believed he could scale a three-metre wooden fence and so he did. He climbed the fence bordering Number 1 exercise yard and leaped down to a track below, a sterile zone that ran along the inside of the prison walls to form a square shape. He crossed the track into the workshops area that was usually patrolled by guards but wasn’t during Sunday prayer service. Sweating, hot, quiet, stealthy, he ran to the back of the workshops and, invisible to the guards, climbed onto an outhouse that allowed him to climb further and up to the roof of the workshops.
Here, potentially visible to the guards in the prison watchtowers, he produced a pair of stolen and smuggled pliers and rapidly cut through the wire netting covering the workshop ventilation windows. Timing, planning, luck, belief. And a slim build. The Houdini of Boggo Road squeezed his thin frame through the ventilation windows and dropped down into the boot-making section of the workshops.
Each workshop section was separated by wire meshing. Slim cut and slipped his way through the wire from the boot shop to the mattress shop, from the mattress shop to the carpenter’s shop, from the carpenters’ shop to the loom shop, from the loom shop to paradise – the brush shop in which he had been working in recent weeks and in which he had hidden his escape kit.
Timing is right for my escape. It’s 3 p.m. in the children’s ward play area, a polished wood floor communal space shaped like half an octagon. The area is bordered by white wood-framed latch windows like the windows in my school. Same time in the afternoon Slim made his escape. A time in the ward when most of these kids – about eighteen kids, aged four to fourteen, battling everything from appendicitis to broken arms to concussions to knife wounds to fingers chopped off by artificial limb specialists – are on a Tang and green cordial high from afternoon tea, their tongues still buzzing with the sweet elixir of the cream inside a Monte Carlo biscuit.
Kids pushing trucks and finger-painting butterflies and pulling their underpants down and playing with their dicks. Older kids reading books and five kids watching Romper Room and hoping gentle Miss Helena inside the television will see them through her magic mirror. A red-haired boy spinning a top made into the shape of a yellow and black tin bumblebee. A girl maybe my age gives me a half-smile the way factory workers might smile at each other across conveyor belts of bumblebee spinning tops. Prints of exotic animals across the walls. And Christopher with the mobile drip. The boy with Ayers Rock inside his melon.
‘You watching this?’ I ask Christopher.
He’s sitting in an armchair in front of the communal television, licking the cream off a split orange-cream biscuit.
‘No,’ he says, indignant. ‘I don’t watch Romper Room. I asked them to put on Diff’rent Strokes but they reckon there’s more young kids than old kids so we have to watch this shit. Fuckin’ bullshit if you ask me. These little pricks can spend the rest of their lives watchin’ Romper Room. I’m gonna be a corpse in three months and all I want to do is watch some Diff’rent Strokes. Nobody gives a shit.’
His tongue licks a slab of orange cream. His light blue hospital gown is as misshapen and crinkled as mine.
‘My name’s Eli,’ I say.
‘Christopher,’ he says.
‘Sorry to hear about your brain,’ I say.
‘I’m not sorry,’ he says. ‘I don’t have to go to school no more. And Mum’s been buying me Golden Gaytimes whenever I feel like one. I just say the word and she stops the car and she runs into a shop and gets me one.’
He spots my bandaged right hand.
‘What happened to your finger?’
I move closer.
‘A drug kingpin’s hitman chopped it off with a Bowie knife,’ I say.
‘Faaark,’ says Christopher. ‘Why’d he do that?’
‘Because my brother wouldn’t tell the drug kingpin what he wanted to know.’
‘What did he want to know?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why didn’t your brother tell him?’
‘Because he doesn’t talk.’
‘Why were they asking someone who doesn’t talk to talk?’
‘Because he did end up talking.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Your end is a dead blue wren.’
‘Whaaaaat?’ asks Christopher.
‘Forget about it,’ I say, leaning in close to his chair, whispering, ‘Listen, see that builder over there?’
Christopher follows my gaze to the other side of the ward floor where a builder is adding an extra section of storage cupboards beside the administration desk in the centre of the ward. Christopher nods.
‘He’s got a toolbox at his feet and inside that toolbox is a box of Benson & Hedges Extra Mild and a purple cigarette lighter,’ I say.
‘So?’ Christopher says.
‘So I need you to go over there and ask him a question while he’s facing away from the toolbox,’ I say. ‘You’ll create a diversion while I sneak in from behind and steal his cigarette lighter from his toolbox.’
Christopher looks puzzled. ‘What’s a diversion?’
It’s what Slim created in December 1953, after being sentenced to life. In the mattress workshop in Number 2 Division he built up a mountain of mattress fibre and tree cotton and set it alight. The burning mountain of mattress was a diversion for arriving guards who didn’t know whether to attend to the fire or to Boggo Road’s most notorious prisoner, who was already climbing a makeshift ladder towards the workshop’s skylight. Slim’s diversion, however, was his undoing because the fire’s flames rose to the roof where he was bashing out the skylight mesh before severe smoke inhalation saw him plummet five metres to the ground. But the lesson remains: fire makes people panicky as fuck.
‘It’s a distraction,’ I say. ‘See my fist.’
I wave my right fist high and in circles and Christopher’s green eyes follow the fist so dutifully he doesn’t see my left hand reach to his ear and tug his earlobe.
‘Yoink,’ I say.
He smiles, nodding.
‘So what do you need the lighter for?’ Christopher asks.
‘To set fire to that copy of Anne of Green Gables sitting over there by the bookcase.’
‘A diversion?’
‘You learn fast,’ I say. ‘That brain of yours still works fine. A big enough diversion that will make those nurses at the administration desk come over here as I make my triumphant escape out through that entry door they’re always eyeing off.’
‘Where you gonna go?’
‘Places, Christopher,’ I say, nodding. ‘I’m going places.’
Christopher nods.
‘You want to come with me?’ I ask.
Christopher considers the offer for a moment.
‘Nah,’ he says. ‘These retards still think they can save me, so I better stick around here for a bit longer.’
He stands, pulls the drip needle out of the top of his hand that’s connecting him to his metal drip trolley.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask.
He’s already walking towards the television when he turns his head briefly.
‘Diversion,’ he says.
The television is a standard size and if it was tipped on its side it would reach up to Christopher’s waist. He leans over it and grips the rear side of the television with his left hand and places his right hand at the base and, in one mighty and clean jerk, his wire-thin arms haul the television above his shoulders. The kids lying down on a rainbow-coloured mat on their bellies watching Romper Room stare in confusion and disbelief as Miss Helena inside the television is tilted on a sharp diagonal as Christopher raises the television in teeth-gritting fury.
‘I said I wanted to watch Diff’rent Strokes!’ he screams.
I step slowly backwards towards the administration desk as four nurses rush from there to surround Christopher in a panicked semicircle. One younger nurse pulls the youngest children away from Christopher as a senior nurse approaches him the way a police negotiator might approach a man in a dynamite vest.
‘Christopher . . . put . . . the . . . television . . . down . . . now.’
I’m already at the entry door when Christopher staggers backwards with the television above his head, the television’s power cord pulled tight and about to be reefed from the power point. He’s singing something.
‘Christopher!’ the senior nurse screams.
He’s singing the theme song to Diff’rent Strokes. It’s a song about understanding and inclusion and difference; about how some are born with less than others and more than others at the same time. It’s a song about connection.
He steps back three, four, five steps, like Frankenstein’s monster steps, and he turns his hip for a stronger thrust and he throws the television and gentle Miss Helena smiling inside it straight through the glass of his nearest latched white wood-framed window to an unknown destination. The nurses gasp and Christopher turns back with his arms raised not in a ‘D’ for Diversion but in a ‘V’ for Victory. He screams in triumph and as the nurses crash-tackle him as a group, his gaze somehow finds me at the entry door in all the diversionary madness. He gives a sharp wink with his left eye and the best I can give him back is a full-blooded fist pump before I slip through the door to freedom.
*
Timing, planning, luck, belief. Planning. After Slim had laboriously cut through the wire meshing of the boot shop and then the mattress shop and the carpenters’ shop and the loom shop on that daring escape of 28 January 1940, he slipped finally through the wire mesh of the brush shop to find his escape kit.
Slim had patience even in those early days, before his longest stretches in Black Peter. He took his time fixing his escape kit between the watchful patrols of workshop guards because time was all he had plenty of. He relished the planning, he found succour in the sneaky adrenaline-filled creativity of a quest for liberty. The secret making and storing of escape tools brought him joy and focus in an otherwise dreary prison world. Between the watchful stares of workshop guards, Slim had spent months fashioning an escape rope, nine metres in length, made of plaited coir, the stuff they made the mats with in the prison carpet-weaving shop, the stuff they made the mat with that Slim laid upon in the cold, damp and dark Black Peter. Every half a metre or so along this rope he double-knotted it to form footholds. Inside his escape kit was a second rope, three metres in length, and two wooden hammock sticks bound together to form a cross that he tied to the nine-metre rope.
With his escape kit in hand, he climbed to the ceiling of the brush shop and cut his way through the mesh of a fanlight ceiling window and found himself, once more, standing atop the workshop rooftop, this time in a position invisible to tower guards, the prison’s Achilles heel, a perfect blind spot that Slim had deduced through patient hour after hour after hour of walking the prison yard with his head held skyward sketching rough geometry drawings in his mind between variables of the guard towers, the workshop roof and freedom.
He used his shorter rope to slip down off the workshop roof, suffering rope burns to his hands on his way down. Now back on the inner track running around the prison perimeter, he looked up at the daunting rise of Boggo Road’s eight-metre brick penitentiary wall. He pulled his bound hammock cross-sticks from his escape kit. What he held in his hands was a grappling hook tied to a nine-metre rope with footholds. And he steadied himself for a throw.
Timing, planning, luck, belief. For weeks in his solitary prison cell, Slim had studied the science and technique required to lodge a grappling hook against a high wall. Along the top of the Boggo Road prison wall were corners where smaller sections of the wall met higher sections. Slim spent weeks throwing two bound matchsticks fixed into a cross and attached to string over a rough scale model of the Boggo Road penitentiary wall. He threw the hook over the wall and he worked the weighted rope along the wall top until it wedged into the corner of a small step where a smaller section of the wall met a higher section. And he told me how it felt when he pulled that rope taut into that corner and the hook stuck firm. Slim said it felt like one Christmas morning he had in the old Church of England orphanage in Carlingford when the housemaster told all those spindly orphans they were having warm plum pudding and custard for dessert at Christmas lunch. And that’s what liberty tastes like, Slim said: warm plum pudding and custard. He hauled himself up that rope, his hands and feet gripping for life on the double-knotted footholds, until he sat perched high up on the prison wall, unseen in his beautiful blind spot, one side of his view from the top way up there to the blooming gardens set beyond the walls of Number 1 yard, the other side of his view the rambling brick prison that was really the only permanent home – the one and only fixed address – he had ever had in his life. He breathed that air up there deep inside him and he reversed the hook so it lodged this time into the prison side of the wall corner that would become known as ‘Halliday’s Leap’ and he climbed on down to freedom.
*
Four floors to freedom for me. I press the button for ‘Ground’ in the hospital elevator. The first thing Slim did after he scrambled his way through the gardens to surrounding Annerley Road as a fugitive was to slip out of his prison clothes. Around 4.10 p.m., about when the prison wardens were calling his name at the afternoon prison muster, Slim was jumping fences through suburban Brisbane, stealing a new outfit from a series of clotheslines.
Now I’m Houdini and here’s my great blink-and-you’ll-miss-it illusion: slipping off my hospital gown to reveal the civilian, non-fugitive clothes I have on underneath: an old dark blue polo shirt and black jeans over my blue and grey Dunlop KT-26 running shoes. I roll the gown up into a ball of blue material I’m holding in my left hand just as the elevator stops at Level 2 of the hospital.
Two male doctors holding clipboards step into the elevator, deep in conversation.
‘I said to the kid’s dad, maybe if he’s having this many concussions on the field you should consider a more low-impact sport, like tennis or golf,’ says one doctor as I move to the back left corner of the elevator, the ball of my gown hidden behind my back.
‘What did he say to that?’ the other doctor asks.
‘He said he couldn’t take him out of the team because the finals were coming up,’ the first doctor says. ‘I said, “Well, Mr Newcombe, I think it comes down to what’s more important to you, an under-15s premiership trophy for Brothers or your son having enough brain function to say the word ‘premiership’.”’
The doctors shake their heads. The first doctor turns to me. I smile.
‘You lost, buddy?’ he asks.
I’ve planned for this. Rehearsed a number of responses over the lamb roast dinner I didn’t eat last night.
‘No, just visiting my brother in the children’s ward,’ I say.
The elevator stops on the ground floor.
‘Your mum and dad with you?’ the doctor asks.
‘Yeah, they’re just having a smoke outside,’ I say.
The elevator doors open and the doctors exit right and I exit towards the hospital foyer, polished concrete floors buzzing with hospital visitors and ambulance officers pushing gurneys. The first doctor spots the bandage on my right hand and stops on the spot. ‘Hey, wait, kid . . .’
Just keep walking. Just keep walking. Confidence. You are invisible. You believe you are invisible and you are invisible. Just keep walking. Past the water cooler. Past a family surrounding a girl with Coke-bottle glasses in a wheelchair. Past a poster of Norm, the beer-bellied dad at the centre of the ‘Life. Be In It.’ TV ads that make August laugh so hard.
I glance a look back over my right shoulder to see the first doctor walk to the administration desk and start talking to a woman at the desk as he points at me. Walking faster now. Faster now. Faster. You are not invisible, you idiot. You are not magic. You are a thirteen-year-old boy about to be captured by that large Pacific Islander security guard the doctor is now talking to and you are about to be sent to live with a father you do not know.
Run.
*
The Royal Brisbane Hospital is on Bowen Bridge Road. I know this area because the Brisbane Exhibition – the Ekka – is held every August a little up the road in the old showgrounds where Mum and Lyle let August and me eat all the contents of our Milky Way showbags one afternoon while we watched five large men from Tasmania furiously chop logs between their feet with axes to rousing applause. We caught the train back home to Darra from Bowen Hills train station – somewhere around here – and on the moving train I vomited the contents of my Milky Way bag into an Army Combat showbag that consisted of a plastic machine gun, a plastic hand grenade, a sling of ammunition and a jungle camouflaged headband that I’d hoped to wear on several top secret rescue missions through the streets of Darra until the headband was drowned in vomit that was two parts chocolate thickshake and one part Dagwood Dog.
A daylight moon outside the hospital. Cars zipping along Bowen Bridge Road. There’s a large grey electrical box on the footpath running by the hospital. I slip behind this box and watch the Pacific Islander security guard rush out of the sliding entry doors of the hospital. He looks left, right, left again. Searching for leads, finding none. He approaches a woman in a green cardigan and fluffy slippers, having a smoke by a bus stop seat and a council bin with an ashtray.
Run now. Catch up to the crowd of people crossing the busy main road at the traffic lights. Walk into the centre of this crowd. Boy on the lam. Boy outfoxes hospital staff. Boy outsmarts world. Boy suckers universe.
I know this street. This is where we entered the Brisbane Exhibition. Lyle and Mum bought the tickets from a guy in a concrete hole in the wall. We walked through horse stables and cow shit and a hundred goats and a barn full of chickens and chicken shit. Then we walked down a hill and we came to Sideshow Alley and August and I begged Lyle to take us on the Ghost Train and then into the Maze of Mirrors where I turned and turned and turned through doors but only ever found myself. Keep walking up this street. Find someone, anyone. Like this man.
‘Excuse me,’ I say.
He’s wearing a large army-green coat and a beanie and he’s nursing a large glass bottle of Coke between his crossed legs as he leans against the concrete wall bordering the showgrounds. The Coke bottle is the kind August and I collect and return sometimes to the corner store in Oxley and the old lady who runs the store gives us twenty cents for our efforts and we spend that twenty cents on twenty one-cent caramel buds. There’s a clear liquid in the man’s Coke bottle and I can smell that it’s methylated spirits. He looks up at me, his lips twitching, eyes adjusting to the sun over my shoulders.
‘Could you point me to the train station?’ I ask.
‘Batman,’ the man says, his head wobbling.
‘Sorry?’
‘Batman,’ he barks.
‘Batman?’
He sings the television theme tune. ‘Nananananananana . . . Batman!’ he hollers.
He’s tanned from the sun and he’s sweating in the large green coat.
‘Yeah, Batman,’ I say.
He points to his neck. The side of his neck is covered in blood. ‘Fuckin’ bat bit me,’ he says. His head wobbles from one side to the other like the pirate-ship swings we ride on every autumn at the Brisbane Exhibition. I see now that his left eye is heavily bruised, blood-clotted.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask. ‘Do you need some help?’
‘I don’t need help,’ he gargles. ‘I’m Batman.’
Adult men. Fucking adult men. Nutters, all of them. Can’t be trusted. Fucking sickos. Freaks. Killers. What was this man’s road to becoming Batman on a side street of inner-city Brisbane? How much good was in him? How much bad? Who was his father? What did his father do? What did his father not do? In what ways did other adult men fuck his life up?
‘Which way to the train station?’ I ask.
‘Wazzat?’ he says.
‘The train station?’ I say, louder.
He points the way, an unsteady right arm and a limp forefinger pointing to an intersection left of here.
‘Just keep walking, Robin,’ he says.
Just keep walking.
‘Thanks, Batman,’ I say.
He holds out his hand.
‘Shake me ’and,’ he demands.
I instinctively go to shake his hand with my right but remember the dressing over my missing finger and tentatively offer my left hand instead.
‘Good, good,’ he says, giving a firm handshake.
‘Thanks again,’ I say.
Then he pulls my hand to his mouth and bites it like a rabid dog.
‘Nnnngrrrrr,’ he spits, his mouth slobbering over my hand. He’s biting my hand but it’s all skin in his mouth, jelly gums. I reef my hand away and he falls back laughing, his mouth open wide and deranged. Not a single tooth in his smile.
Run.
Sprinting now. Sprinting now like I’m Eric Grothe, powerhouse winger for the mighty Parramatta Eels, and there’s a sideline beside me and a try line eighty metres in front of me. Sprint like my life depended on it. Sprint like there’s jet boots on my feet and fire in my heart that never goes out. Across the intersection. My Dunlop KT-26s will guide my way. Just trust in the sleek cushioned design of the KT-26, cheapest, most effective runner in all of Kmart. Sprint like I’m the last warm-blooded boy on earth and the world is overrun by vampires. Vampire bats.
Run. Past a car dealership to my right and a hedgerow to my left. Run. Past an orange brick building to my left that takes up a whole block of land. A name fixed in fancy letters to the building. The Courier-Mail.
Stop.
This is where they make it. This is where they build the newspaper. Slim told me about this place. All the writers come here and they type their stories out and typesetters put their stories on metal down in the printing presses at the back of the building. Slim said he spoke to a journalist once who told him he could smell his stories being pressed in ink in the evening. There was no greater smell, the journo told Slim, than tomorrow’s front page scoop being pressed in ink. I breathe deep and smell it and I swear I can smell that ink because maybe they’re all on deadline and the presses are already running and I’m gonna be part of that place somehow, some day, I just know it, because why else did Batman with no teeth send me down here, down this very street where The Courier-Mail crime writers return to file their pieces and change the State and change the world? Batman was just a bit player, maybe, but he acted well in the grand production of The Extraordinary and Unexpected Yet Totally Expected Life of Eli Bell. Of course he sent me down here. Of course he did.
A police car passes through the intersection, moving across the road I’m standing on. Two officers. The officer in the passenger seat looks my way. Don’t engage. Don’t engage. But it’s two cops in a police car and I can’t resist engaging. The police officer is eyeballing me now. The police car slows, then continues across the intersection. Run.
*
Slim had been on the run for almost two weeks before he was first reported by a civilian on 9 February 1940. A State-wide manhunt stretched to the New South Wales border and police cars lined roads leading south, where most expected Slim to go. But Slim was heading north when he pulled into a service station in Nundah, in Brisbane’s suburban north, at 3 a.m., to fill up a car he’d stolen from nearby Clayfield. The service station owner, a man named Walter Wildman, was woken by the sound of petrol being pumped from a garage bowser. He promptly and justifiably sprang upon Slim with a loaded double-barrel shotgun.
‘Stand still!’ barked Wildman.
‘You wouldn’t shoot a man, would you?’ Slim reasoned.
‘Yes,’ replied Wildman. ‘I’d blow your brains out.’
This admission naturally prompted Slim to run for the driver’s seat of his stolen car, which in turn prompted Walter Wildman to fire twice at Slim, attempting to blow his brains out but succeeding only in shattering the car’s rear window. Slim sped off towards the Bruce Highway, heading north, as Walter Wildman phoned police to report the car’s numberplate. He got as far as Caboolture, about thirty minutes out of Brisbane, before a police vehicle jumped on his tail, sparking a thrilling car chase through bush side roads and around blind corners and into and out of gullies, which ended with Slim crashing the car through a wire fence. Running into scrub on foot, Slim was quickly surrounded by some thirty detectives from Queensland Police who eventually found him hiding behind a wide tree stump. The police drove Slim back to Boggo Road and threw him back in his cell in Number 2 Division and they slammed the cell door shut and Slim sat back down on his hard prison bed. And he smiled.
‘Why were you smiling?’ I once asked Slim.
‘I established a goal and I achieved it,’ he said. ‘Finally, young Eli, this good-for-nothin’ orphan scumbag you’re lookin’ at had found something he was good at. I realised why the man upstairs made me so fuckin’ tall and lanky. Good for jumpin’ over prison walls.’
*
Train tracks. A train. Bowen Hills train station. The Ipswich line, platform 3. A train pulling in and a set of concrete stairs I sprint down. Maybe fifty concrete steps I’m bounding down, two at a time, one eye on the steps, one eye on the train’s open doors. Then a mistimed step and my right ankle in my right Dunlop KT-26 rolls on the edge of the very last step and I dive face-first onto the rough bitumen of platform 3. My right shoulder cushions most of the impact but my right cheek and ear scrape along the surface like the back tyre of my BMX when I slam the brakes on for a long skid. But those train doors are still open so I lift myself up from the ground and stagger, winded and groggy, towards them as they start closing and I leap for my life and land inside, where three elderly women sharing a four-seat space turn to face me, gasping.
‘Are you all right there?’ asks an old woman holding her handbag with both hands on her lap.
I nod, sucking breath, turning to walk down the train corridor. Small bitumen gravel pebbles are lodged in my face. Air stings the open graze on my cheek. The knuckle that once controlled my missing finger screams for attention. I sit and I breathe and I pray this train stops at Darra.
*
Deserted suburbs at dusk. Maybe the world did end. Maybe it is just me and the vampires are sleeping because it’s still daylight. Maybe I’m losing my mind and I shouldn’t be walking like this in the sun, with the hospital painkillers wearing off, but this dream is growing real because I can smell my underarms and I can taste the sweat above my top lip. I walk past the Darra Station Road shops. Past Mama Pham’s restaurant. Past an empty Burger Rings packet blowing in circles in the wind. Past the fruit and vegetable market. Past the hairdressers and the op shop and the TAB. Across Ducie Street Park with the seeds of the paspalum grass catching on the bottom of my jeans and in the white laces of my Dunlops. Almost there. Almost home.
Careful now. Sandakan Street. I scan the street from afar, hiding behind a sprawling widowmaker swaying in the afternoon breeze. No cars in front of our house. No people in the street. I move cautiously and quickly between trees, zig-zagging my way across the park towards our house. The sky is orange and deep pink above the house and night is falling. Returning to the scene of the crime. I’m tired but I’m nervous, too. Not sure this quest was such a good idea. But I’m supposed to be going places. The only way is up out of a hole. Or further down, I guess. Straight down to hell.
I scurry across the road, through the gate like I’m meant to be here because it’s my house after all, or Lyle’s house, I should say. Lyle’s house. Lyle.
Can’t go through the front. Go through the back. If the back door’s locked, try Lena’s window. If Lena’s window is locked, try the sliding kitchen window on the old neighbour Gene Crimmins’s side and maybe Mum, or was it me, forgot to put that length of metal curtain rod in the window track to lock out intruders. Intruders like me. Intruders like me with big plans.
Going places.
Back door’s locked. Lena’s window doesn’t budge. I bring the black wheelie bin around to the kitchen window, pull myself atop the bin and reef at the window. It slides five centimetres along the window track and I’m hopeful, then it slams against the curtain rod and I’m not hopeful at all. Fuck it. Desperate times. Break a window.
I jump off the bin. It’s getting dark but I can still see under the house, the dirt floor strewn with rocks, but none big enough for my needs. But this will do. A brick. Probably one of those glorious bricks from the factory up the road. A hometown brick. A Darra brick. I slip back out from under the house and I sit the brick on top of the wheelie bin and I’m pulling myself back up on top of the bin when a voice echoes over my shoulder.
‘Everything all right, Eli?’ asks Gene Crimmins, leaning out of his living room through an open casement window. The space between Gene’s house and ours is only about three metres so he can talk softly. He’s a soft talker anyway, which I’ve always found calming. I like Gene. Gene knows how to be discreet.
‘G’day Gene,’ I say, turning to him, letting go of the bin.
Gene’s wearing a white singlet and blue cotton pyjama bottoms.
He registers my face.
‘Bloody hell, mate, what happened to you?’
‘Tripped over running down the train station stairs.’
Gene nods. ‘You locked out?’
I nod.
‘Your mum around?’ he asks.
I shake my head.
‘Lyle?’
I shake my head.
He nods.
‘I saw those boys dragging him out to a car the other night,’ Gene says. ‘Figured they weren’t all going for ice cream.’
I shake my head.
‘He all right?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘But I’m hoping to find out. Just need to get inside.’
‘That what the brick’s for?’
I nod.
‘I never saw you, all right?’ he says.
‘Thanks for being discreet, Gene,’ I say.
‘You still got those wicket keeper’s hands you used to have in the backyard?’ Gene asks.
‘Yeah, guess so.’
‘Catch,’ he says.
He throws a key and I catch it with two cupped hands. The key’s attached to a kangaroo bottle-opener key ring.
‘That’s the spare Lyle asked me to hold on to for a rainy day,’ Gene says.
I nod in thanks.
‘It’s rainin’ a bit, Gene,’ I say.
‘Pissin’ down,’ Gene says.
*
The house is dark and silent. I keep the lights off. Our dishes from the night we had spaghetti bolognese are stacked in a dish rack beside the sink. Someone’s cleaned up. Slim, I guess. I cup a hand beneath the kitchen tap and take a long drink of water. I open the fridge and find a knob of wrapped devon and a block of Coon cheese. I wonder how Slim ate on the lam. Water from creeks, robbing eggs from chook pens, maybe; stealing buns when bakers weren’t looking; plucking oranges from trees. Staying fed and watered is a public activity, raising one’s head is often required to make it work. There’s a loaf of Tip-Top bread on the kitchen bench and I smell it in the darkness and know immediately it’s green with mould. I take bites from the devon and the cheese, mixing them together in my mouth. Not the same without bread, but filling the yawning hole in my stomach. I take the red torch from the third drawer down below the kitchen sink. Pad straight to Lena’s room.
This room of true love. This room of blood. Jesus on the wall. The light from my torch lands on his sorrowful face and he looks so distant and aloof to me in the darkness.
My right hand is throbbing. My forefinger knuckle is hot and full with blood going nowhere. I need rest. I need to stop moving. I need to lie down. I slide Lena’s wardrobe door across, slide Lena’s old dresses along the rod they hang on. I push with my left hand against the wardrobe’s rear wall and it compresses and pops back open. Lyle’s secret door.
It has to be here. Why would it be anywhere else?
The light from my torch makes a small moon the size of a tennis ball bounce across the dirt ground of Lyle’s secret room. I slip down and my Dunlops dig into dirt. My torchlight finds every corner of the brick-walled room. Then it circles around the middle of the room, along the walls, across the red telephone. It has to be here. It has to be here. Why would he hide it anywhere else but his secret room built for hiding things in?
But the room is empty.
I hunch down and scramble for the secret door built into the wall of the secret room. I get a grip on the door flap and stick the torch into the tunnel Lyle has dug stretching to the thunderbox beyond. The tunnel is clear of snakes and spiders. Nothing but soil and thick air.
Fuck. Heart pounding. Got to do a piss. Don’t want to do this. Got to do this.
I collapse onto my belly and push myself into the hole with my kneecaps. I cradle my wounded right hand and pull myself along with my elbows scraping the dirt floor. Dirt falls into my eyes when my head bumps the tunnel ceiling. Breathe. Stay calm. Almost out. My torch shines down the tunnel and I can make something out, something resting on the floor of the thunderbox cavity. A box.
The sight of it makes me scramble quicker along the floor. I’m a crab. I’m a soldier crab. One of those little purple ones with a body like a marble. August and I would let them crawl over us in their hundreds on the shores of Bribie Island, Lyle’s favourite day-trip destination, an hour north of Brisbane. Lyle would pick two or three crabs up in his hand and they’d claw at his fingers and then he’d place them casually on top of our heads. The sun would set and there’d be nobody on the beach but us boys fishing and a couple of seagulls with their hungry eyes on our pilchards.
My head emerges from the tunnel into the thunderbox and the torchlight shines over a box. A white box. One of Bich Dang’s rectangular Styrofoam boxes. Of course he put it here. Of course he put it in the thunderbox.
I pull my legs up and hunch down with the torch over the box, flip the lid off with my left hand. And there is nothing in the box. The torchlight races across the box but no matter how many times I trace it back and forth, nothing appears inside. Empty. Tytus Broz got here first. Tytus Broz knows everything. Tytus Broz is one day older than the universe.
Kick the box. Kick this fucking Styrofoam box. Kick this fucking life of mine and kick fucking Lyle and fucking Tytus Broz and psychotic Iwan Krol and Mum and August and pissant Teddy and bullshit Slim who mustn’t have ever really given that much of a shit about me if he didn’t want to take me home with him in my darkest hour. Slim, of all people, who I woulda thought knew what it felt like to be rag-dolled by life and unwanted and unwished.
My right Dunlop is stomping now. Bits of Styrofoam scatter across the thunderbox floor, falling into shapes on the sawdust ground like disconnected countries on a world map. And what’s this shit in my eyes, this bullshit liquid that betrays me every single time? It floods my eyes and my face and I struggle to breathe there’s that much of it coming out of me. Yeah, that’s it. That’s how I’ll go. I’ll cry myself to death. I’ll cry so hard I’ll die of water loss right here in this shithole. A shithole end to a shithole existence. Caitlyn Spies can write my story up in the South-West Star.
The body of thirteen-year-old hospital escapee Eli Bell, who had been missing for eight weeks, was found yesterday at the bottom of a backyard shithole. He had apparently destroyed the box he’d hoped would save the life of the only man he ever really loved. His only relative available for comment, older brother August Bell, said nothing.
Caitlyn Spies. I fall to the ground in exhaustion. I drop my bony arse into the sawdust and exhale as I rest my back on the rough wood wall of the thunderbox hole. Close your eyes. Breathe. And sleep. Sleep. I turn the torch off and rest it in my waist. It’s warm in this shithole. It’s cosy. Sleep now. Sleep.
I can see Caitlyn Spies. I can see her. She’s walking in the sunset on Bribie Island beach. There are thousands of purple soldier crabs before her but they part for her, they map out a footpath of perfect Queensland beach sand and she paces down it slowly, acknowledging the hardworking soldier crabs with her open palms. She has dark brown hair and it blows in the sea breeze and I can see her face even though I’ve never seen her face. Her eyes are deep and green and knowing and she smiles because she knows me the same way she knows everything about everything. The soldier crabs at her feet and the sun falling in the sky and her top lip that curls a little when she smiles like that. Caitlyn Spies. The most beautiful girl I’ve never seen. She wants to tell me something. ‘Come closer. Come closer,’ she says, ‘and I’ll whisper it.’ Her lips move and her words are familiar. ‘Boy swallows universe,’ she says.
And she turns her head and she casts her eyes across what was once the Pacific Ocean but is now a vast galaxy of stars and planets and supernovas and a thousand astronomical events occurring in unison. Explosions of pink and purple. Combustive moments in bright orange and green and yellow and all those glittery stars against the eternal black canvas of space. We are standing at the edge of the universe and the universe stops and starts here with us. And Saturn is within arm’s reach. And its rings begin to vibrate. Buzz. Buzz. And its vibrating rings sound like a telephone. Ring, ring.
‘Are you going to get that?’ asks Caitlyn Spies.
A telephone. I open my eyes. The sound of a telephone. Ring, ring. Back through the secret tunnel, back in the secret room. Lyle’s secret red telephone is ringing.
I crawl back through the tunnel. Damp dirt under my bruised kneecaps and my grazed elbows. This call is so important. This call is so perfectly timed. I mean, how about them odds? Me being down here and the phone ringing while I’m down here? I reach the other end of the tunnel and clamber into the secret room and the phone is still ringing. You just wouldn’t credit it. Good ol’ Eli Bell, the lucky Johnny on the Spot once again, right secret place, right unknown time. I reach out to take the secret red phone handset off the secret red push button base. Wait. Think about this remarkable coincidence. Me down here just as the phone rings. Extraordinarily well timed if you don’t know I’m down here. Not so extraordinary, however, if you saw me trying to climb in through the kitchen window. Not so extraordinary if Gene Crimmins has boarded the Tytus Broz gravy train and he was actually foxin’ me with all that windowsill kindness. Not so extraordinary if Iwan Krol is waiting outside in a car listening to The Carpenters softly on the radio as he sharpens his Bowie knife.
Ring, ring. Fuck it. Sometimes when Saturn calls, you just gotta answer.
‘Hello,’ I say.
‘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.
‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ I ask. ‘The one I spoke to when Lyle said I wasn’t speaking to no one but I was.’
‘That’s me, I guess,’ the man says.
‘How’d you know I was down here?’
‘I didn’t,’ he says.
‘Then it’s a hell of a fluke you got me as I was passing through,’ I say.
‘Not so flukey,’ he says. ‘I must call this number forty times a day.’
‘What number do you dial?’
‘I dial the number for Eli Bell,’ he says.
‘What number is that?’
‘773 8173.’
‘That’s insane,’ I say. ‘This phone doesn’t take calls.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Lyle.’
‘But isn’t this a call?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So I guess it takes calls,’ he says. ‘Now, tell me, where are you at?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘At what stage of your life are you at?’
‘Well, I’m thirteen years old . . .’
‘Yes, yes,’ he says, urgent. ‘But be more specific. Is it close to Christmas?’
‘Huh?’
‘Never mind,’ he says. ‘What are you doing right now and why? And please don’t lie because I will know if you are lying.’
‘Why should I tell you anything?’
‘Because I need to tell you something important about your mother, Eli,’ he says, frustrated. ‘But first I need you to tell me what has just happened to you and your family.’
‘Lyle got taken away by some men who work for Tytus Broz,’ I say. ‘Then Iwan Krol chopped off my lucky finger and I passed out and woke up in hospital and Slim told me Mum got taken to the Boggo Road women’s prison and Gus got taken to my father’s house in Bracken Ridge and I escaped from hospital and I’m on the run like Slim in 1940 and I came here to find . . . to find . . .’
‘The drugs,’ the man says. ‘You wanted to find Lyle’s stash of heroin because you thought you could take that to Tytus Broz and he might exchange the drugs for Lyle but . . .’
‘It’s gone,’ I say. ‘Tytus got to the drugs before me. He got the drugs and he got Lyle. He got it all.’
I yawn. I’m so tired. ‘I’m tired,’ I say down the phone line. ‘I’m so tired. I must be dreaming this. This is just a dream.’
My eyes are closing with exhaustion.
‘This is not a dream, Eli,’ the man says.
‘This is crazy,’ I say, dizzy now, confused. A fever chill. ‘How did you find me?’
‘You picked up the phone, Eli.’
‘I don’t understand. I’m so tired.’
‘You need to listen to me, Eli.’
‘Okay, I’m listening,’ I say.
‘Are you really listening?’ the man asks.
‘Yes, I’m really listening.’
A long pause.
‘Your mum will not survive Christmas Day,’ the man says.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘She’s on obs, Eli,’ he says.
‘What’s obs?’
‘Observation, Eli,’ he says. ‘Suicide watch.’
‘Who are you?’
I’m feeling sick. I need to sleep. I have a fever.
‘Christmas is coming, Eli,’ the man says.
‘You’re scaring me and I need to sleep,’ I say.
‘Christmas is coming, Eli,’ he says. ‘Sleigh bells.’
‘I’ve gotta lie down.’
‘Sleigh bells, Eli,’ the man says. ‘Sleigh bells!’
‘I gotta close my eyes.’
‘Sleigh bells,’ the man repeats.
What was that song she sang about sleigh bells? ‘Sleigh bells ring, are you listenin’? In the lane, snow is glistenin’. Gone away is the blue bird. Here to stay is the new bird.’
‘Yeah, sleigh bells,’ I say to the man. ‘Your end is a dead blue wren.’
And I hang up the phone and I curl up on the earth floor of Lyle’s secret room and I pretend that Slim’s girl Irene is sleeping down here in the hole with me. I slide into a bed with her and I spoon against her porcelain skin and I reach a comforting arm across her warm breast and she turns to kiss me goodnight with the face of Caitlyn Spies. The most beautiful face I’ve never seen.