Boy Swallows Universe. Trent Dalton
they even bite your arse in your dreams. Perspective’s a funny thing. The world seems so different looking up at it from six feet under. Life from the bottom of a shithole. The only way is up from here for August and Eli Bell.
Lyle removes the thick sheet of wood with the hole in it that stretches across the thunderbox and acts as the toilet seat that once cushioned the plump backsides of Lena and Aureli and every one of Aureli’s workmates who helped build the house we just miraculously crawled away from through a secret underground tunnel.
Lyle reaches his right arm down into the void, hand extended for grabbing.
‘C’mon,’ he says.
I move back from his hand.
‘No, you’re gonna give us a floggin’,’ I say.
‘Well, I can’t lie,’ he says.
‘Fuck this.’
‘Don’t fuckin’ swear, Eli,’ Lyle says.
‘I’m not going anywhere until you give us some answers,’ I bark.
‘Don’t test me, Eli.’
‘You and Mum are using again.’
Got him. He drops his head, shakes it. He’s tender now, compassionate and regretful.
‘We’re not using, mate,’ he says. ‘I promised you both. I don’t break my promises.’
‘Who was the guy on the red phone?’ I shout.
‘What guy?’ Lyle asks. ‘What the hell are you talking about, Eli?’
‘The phone rang and August picked it up.’
‘Eli . . .’
‘The man,’ I say. ‘Deep voice. He’s your drug boss isn’t he? He’s the man who gave you the bag of heroin I found in the mower catcher.’
‘Eli . . .’
‘He’s the big bad mastermind, the puppet master behind it all, the kingpin who sounds all sweet and nice and boring like a high school Science teacher but is actually a murderous megalomaniac.’
‘Eli, damn it!’ he screams.
I stop. Lyle shakes his head. He takes a breath.
‘That phone doesn’t get calls,’ he says. ‘Your imagination’s getting the better of you again, Eli.’
I turn to August. I turn back up to Lyle.
‘It rang, Lyle. August picked it up. A man was on the other end. He knew my name. He knew us all. He knew Slim. I thought for a minute it was you but then . . .’
‘That’s enough, Eli,’ Lyle barks. ‘Whose idea was it to go into Lena’s room?’
August puts a thumb to his chest. Lyle nods his head.
‘All right, here’s the deal,’ he says. ‘Come up now and get what’s coming to you, and after everyone’s settled down a bit I’ll update you on a few things we got goin’ on.’
‘Fuck that,’ I say. ‘I want answers now.’
Lyle replaces the wood toilet seat back on the thunderbox.
‘Let me know when you find your manners again, Eli,’ he says.
Lyle walks away.
*
Four years ago I thought he was going to walk away forever. He stood at the front door with a duffle bag over his right shoulder. I clutched his left hand and leaned back on it with all my weight and he dragged me with him out the door.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, Lyle.’
Tears in my eyes and tears in my nose and mouth.
‘I gotta get myself better, mate,’ he said. ‘August is gonna look after your mum for me. And you gotta look after August, all right.’
‘No,’ I howled and he turned his head and I thought I had him because he never cries but his eyes were wet. ‘No.’
Then he shouted at me: ‘Let me go, Eli.’ And he pushed me back through the door and I fell to the linoleum floor of the front sunroom, friction taking skin from my elbows.
‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back.’
‘You’re lying,’ I shouted.
‘I can’t lie, Eli.’
Then he walked out the front door and out along the path to the front gate and out further past the wrought-iron letterbox and the brown brick fence with the single missing brick. I followed him all the way out to the gate and I was screaming so loud it hurt my throat. ‘You’re a liar,’ I screamed. ‘You’re a liar. You’re a liar. You’re a liar.’ But he didn’t even turn around. He just kept walking away.
But then he came back. Six months later. It was January and it was hot and I was in the front yard, shirtless and tanned, with my thumb on the garden hose directing arcing sheets of vapour spray to the sun to make my own rainbows and I saw him walking through the wall of water. He opened the front gate and closed it behind him and I dropped the hose and ran to him. He had navy blue work pants on and a navy blue denim work shirt covered in grease. He was fit and strong and when he kneeled on the pathway to meet my height I thought he kneeled like King Arthur and I had never loved another man more in my short life. So rainbows are Lyle and grease is Lyle and King Arthur is Lyle. I ran at him so hard he nearly fell backwards with my impact, because I hit him like Ray Price, steel-hard lock forward for the triumphant Parramatta Eels. He laughed and when my fingers clutched at his shoulders to draw him closer, he dropped his head on my hair and kissed the top of my head and I don’t know why I said what I said next but I said it all the same. ‘Dad,’ I said.
He gave a half-smile and he straightened me up with his hands on both my shoulders, stared into my eyes. ‘You’ve already got a dad, mate,’ he said. ‘But you got me, too.’
Five days later Mum was locked in Lena’s room, punching the thin fibro walls with her fists. Lyle had nailed wooden boards across the room’s two sets of windows. He’d dragged out Lena’s old bed and taken the Jesus picture off the wall, removed Lena’s old vases and framed photographs of distant relatives and close friends from the Darra Lawn Bowls Club. The room was bare but for a thin mattress with no sheets or blankets or pillows. For seven days Lyle kept Mum locked in that sky-blue room. Lyle, August and I would stand outside her locked door, listening to her screams, long and random banshee howls, as if beyond that locked door was a Grand Inquisitor overseeing some wicked variety of torture involving pulley systems and Mum’s outstretched limbs. But I knew for certain there was no one else in that room but her. She howled at lunch, she wailed at midnight. Gene Crimmins, our next-door neighbour on the right side, a retired and likeable postman with a thousand tales of misdirected mail and suburban kerbside happenstance, came over to check on things.
‘She’s almost there, mate,’ was all Lyle said at the front door. And Gene simply nodded like he knew exactly what Lyle was talking about. Like he knew how to be discreet.
On the fifth day, Mum singled me out because she knew I was the weakest.
‘Eli,’ she cried through the door. ‘He is trying to kill me. You need to call the police. Call them, Eli. He wants to kill me.’
I ran to our phone and I dialled three zeroes on the long rotary dial until August gently put his finger down on the receiver. He shook his head. No, Eli.
I wept and August put a gentle arm around my neck and we walked back down the hallway and stood staring at the door. I wept some more. Then I walked to the lounge room and I slid open the sliding bottom doors of the wood veneer wall unit that held Mum’s vinyl records. Between the Buttons by the Rolling Stones. The one she played so much, the one with the cover where they’re standing in their winter coats and Keith Richards is all blurred