Boy Swallows Universe. Trent Dalton
lucky freckle, and everything about my brother, August, will remind me of her.
‘What name?’ Slim asks.
‘Caitlyn.’
Caitlyn. There’s no doubt about it. Caitlyn. That right forefinger and an endless blue sky sheet of paper with that name on it.
‘You know anyone named Caitlyn?’ asks Slim.
‘No.’
‘What’s the second word?’
I follow August’s finger, swirling through the sky.
‘It’s “spies”,’ I say.
‘Caitlyn spies,’ Slim says. ‘Caitlyn spies.’ He drags on his cigarette, contemplatively. ‘What the fuck does that mean?’
Caitlyn spies. No doubt about it.
Your end is a dead blue wren. Boy swallows universe. Caitlyn spies.
No doubt about it.
These are the answers.
The answers to the questions.
This room of true love. This room of blood. Sky-blue fibro walls. Off-colour paint patches where Lyle has puttied up holes. A made-up queen bed, tightly tucked white sheet, an old thin grey blanket that wouldn’t have been out of place in one of those death camps Lyle’s mum and dad were escaping from. Everybody running from something, especially ideas.
A framed Jesus portrait over the bed. The son and his jagged crown, reasonably calm for all the blood dripping down his forehead – so cool under pressure that guy – but frowning like always because August and I aren’t supposed to be in here. This still blue room, the quietest place on earth. This room of true companionship.
Slim says the mistake of all those old English writers and all those matinee movies is to suggest true love comes easy, that it waits on stars and planets and revolutions around the sun. Waits on fate. Dormant true love, there for everybody, just waiting to be found, erupting when the thread of existence collides with chance and the eyes of two lovers meet. Boom. From what I’ve seen of it, true love is hard. Real romance has death in it. It has midnight shakes and flecks of shit across a bedsheet. True love like this dies if it has to wait for fate. True love like this asks lovers to cast aside what is meant to be and work with what is.
August leads, boy wants to show me something.
‘He’ll kill us if he finds us in here.’
Lena’s room is out of bounds. Lena’s room is sacred. Only Lyle enters Lena’s room. August shrugs. He grips a flashlight in his right hand, passes Lena’s bed.
‘This bed makes me sad.’
August nods knowingly. It makes me sadder, Eli. Everything makes me sadder. My emotions run deeper than yours, Eli, don’t forget it.
The bed sags on one side, weighed down on one half for the eight years that Lena Orlik slept alone on it without the balancing weight of her husband, Aureli Orlik, who died of prostate cancer on this bed in 1968.
Aureli died quiet. Died as quiet as this room.
‘Reckon Lena’s watching us right now?’
August smiles, shrugs his shoulders. Lena believed in God but she didn’t believe in love, or at least the kind written in stars. Lena didn’t believe in fate because if her love of Aureli was meant to be then the birth and the whole unholy and deranged head-fuck adulthood of Adolf Hitler was also meant to be because that monster, ‘that filthy potwor’, was the only reason they met in 1945 in an American-run displaced persons holding camp in Germany where they stayed for four years, long enough for Aureli to collect the silver that formed Lena’s wedding ring. Lyle was born in the camp in 1949, spent his first night on earth sleeping in a large iron wash bucket, wrapped in a grey blanket like the one right here on this bed. America wouldn’t take Lyle and Great Britain wouldn’t take Lyle, but Australia would and Lyle never forgot this fact, which is why, during a wildly misspent youth, he never burned or vandalised property marked Made in Australia.
In 1951 the Orliks arrived at the Wacol East Dependants Holding Camp for Displaced Persons, a sixty-second bike ride from our house. For four years they lived among two thousand people sharing timber huts with a total of three hundred and forty rooms, with communal toilets and baths. Aureli landed a job pegging sleepers for the new rail line between Darra and neighbouring suburbs, Oxley and Corinda. Lena worked in a timber factory in Yeerongpilly, in the south-west, cutting sheets of plywood alongside men twice her size and with half her pluck.
Aureli built this room himself, built the whole house on weekends with Polish friends from the railway line. No electricity for the first two years. Lena and Aureli taught themselves English by kerosene lamp light. The house spread, room by nailed room, short stump by short stump, until the smell of Lena’s Polish wild mushroom soup and potato and cheese pierogi and cabbage golabki and roasted lamb baranina filled three bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, a lounge room, a laundry off the kitchen, a bathroom and a standalone flushable toilet beneath a wall hanging of Warsaw’s white three-nave Church of the Holiest Saviour.
August stops, turns to the room’s built-in wardrobe. Lyle built this wardrobe himself using all those woodcraft skills he learned watching his dad and his dad’s Polish friends piece this house together.
‘What is it, Gus?’
August nods his head right. You should open the wardrobe door.
Aureli Orlik lived a quiet life and was determined to die quietly too, with dignity, not to the sound of heart monitors and rushing medical staff. He wouldn’t make a scene. Every time Lena returned to this death room with an empty pisspot or a fresh towel to wipe her husband’s vomit from his chest, Aureli would apologise for causing such trouble. His last word to Lena was ‘Sorry’, and he didn’t stick around long enough to clarify what exactly he was sorry for, and Lena could only be sure he did not mean their love because she knew there was hardship in this true love and endurance and reward and failure and renewal and, finally, death, but never regret.
I open the wardrobe. An old ironing board standing up. A bag of Lena’s old clothes on the wardrobe floor. A hanging row of Lena’s dresses, in single colours: olive, tan, black, blue.
Lena died loud, a violent cacophony of crashing steel and a Frankie Valli high note, returning from Toowoomba’s Carnival of Flowers along the Warrego Highway at twilight, eighty minutes out of Brisbane, her Ford Cortina meeting the front steel grille of a semitrailer hauling pineapples. Lyle was down south in a Kings Cross drug rehab with his old girlfriend, Astrid, on the second of three attempts to kick a decade-long heroin habit. He was jonesing all the way through a subsequent meeting with police officers from the highway town of Gatton who attended the scene. ‘She wouldn’t have suffered,’ said a senior officer, which Lyle took as the officer’s tender way of saying, ‘The truck was fuckin’ huuuuge.’ The officer handed over the only possessions of Lena’s they were able to prise from the Cortina’s wreckage: Lena’s handbag, a set of rosary beads, a small round pillow that she sat on to see better above the steering wheel and, miraculously, a cassette tape recording ejected from the car’s modest stereo system, Lookin’ Back by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons.
‘Fuck,’ Lyle said, holding the tape, shaking his head.
‘What?’ said the officer.
‘Nothing,’ Lyle said, realising an explanation would delay the smack fix that was dominating his thoughts, the physical need for drugs and their beautiful daydream – for what I heard Mum once call ‘the siesta’ – creating an emotional levee that would break a week later, flooding him with the notion that there was no longer a single person left on earth who loved