Boy Swallows Universe. Trent Dalton
left arm up to the thought of how romantic his mum was, how deeply she loved her husband, and how the soaring high notes of Frankie Valli made every human on earth smile except his mother. Frankie Valli made Lena Orlik weep. In a heroin haze, Lyle placed The Four Seasons cassette into Teddy’s basement tape deck. He pressed play because he wanted to hear the song that was playing when she smashed into the semitrailer full of pineapples. It was ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’, and in that moment Lyle remembered, as sure as Frankie Valli’s first high note, that accidents never happened to Lena Orlik.
True love comes hard.
‘What is it, Gus?’
He puts a forefinger to his lips. He silently shifts aside the bag of Lena’s clothes, slides Lena’s dresses across the wardrobe’s hanging pole. He pushes against the rear wall of the wardrobe space and a sheet of white painted timber, a metre by a metre, clicks against a compression mechanism behind the wall and falls forward into August’s hands.
‘What are you doing, Gus?’
He slides the timber sheet along the back of Lena’s hanging dresses.
A black void opens behind the wardrobe, a chasm, a space of unknown distance beyond the wall. August’s eyes are wide, elated by the hope and possibility in the void.
‘What is that?’
We met Lyle through Astrid, and Mum met Astrid in the Sisters of Mercy Women’s Refuge in Nundah, on Brisbane’s north side. We were all dipping bread rolls into beef stew – Mum, August and me – in the refuge dining room. Mum says Astrid was at the end of our table. I was five years old. August was six and kept pointing at a purple crystal tattooed beneath Astrid’s left eye, shaped so it looked like she was crying crystals. Astrid was Moroccan and beautiful and permanently young and always so bejewelled and mystical that I’d come to think of her and her exposed coffee-coloured belly as a character from Arabian Nights, a keeper of magical lamps and daggers and flying carpets and hidden meanings. At the refuge dining table Astrid turned and stared into August’s eyes and August stared back, smiling for long enough that it inspired Astrid to turn to Mum.
‘You must feel special,’ she said.
‘For what?’ Mum asked.
‘Spirit chose you to watch over him,’ she said, nodding at August.
Spirit, we would later discover, was an all-encompassing term for the creator of all living things who visited Astrid on occasion in three manifestations: a mystical white-robed goddess spirit, Sharna; an Egyptian Pharaoh named Om Ra; and Errol, a farting, foul-mouthed representation of all the universe’s ills, who spoke like a small drunk Irishman. Lucky for us, Spirit liked August and Spirit soon made some miraculous communication with Astrid about how her path to enlightenment included arrangements to have us stay for three months in the sunroom of her grandmother Zohra’s house in Manly, in Brisbane’s eastern suburbs. I was only five years old but I still called bullshit, but Manly’s a place where a boy can run barefoot across the low-tide mudflats of Moreton Bay for so long he can convince himself he’s running all the way to the edge of Atlantis, where he might live forever, or until the smell of crumbed cod and chips calls him home, so I made like August and shut my trap.
Lyle came to Zohra’s house to see Astrid. He soon came to Zohra’s house to play Scrabble with Mum. Lyle’s not book smart but he’s street smart and he reads paperback novels endlessly so he knows plenty of words, like Mum. Lyle says he fell in love with Mum the moment she landed the word ‘quixotic’ on a triple word score.
Mum’s love came hard. There was pain in it, there was blood and screams and fists against fibro walls, because the worst thing Lyle ever did was get my mum on drugs. I guess the best thing Lyle ever did was get her off drugs, but he knows I know that the latter could never make up for the former. He got her off drugs in this room. This room of true love. This room of blood.
August turns on the flashlight, shines it into the black void beyond the wardrobe wall. The dead white light illuminates a small room almost as big as our bathroom. The torchlight shines on three brown brick walls, a cavity deep enough for a grown man to stand in, like some kind of fallout shelter but unstocked and empty. The floor is made of the earth that the room was dug out from. August’s torch shines on the empty space until it finds the only objects in the room. A wood stool with a cushioned circular seat. And upon this stool is a push-button box telephone. The telephone is red.
The worst kind of junkie is the one who thinks they’re not the worst kind of junkie. Mum and Lyle were woeful for a while there, about four years ago. Not in the way they looked, just the way they behaved. Not forgetting my eighth birthday, as such, just sleeping through it, that kind of thing. Booby-trap syringes and shit. You’d creep into their bedroom to wake them up and tell them it was Easter, hop onto their bed like the joyful seasonal bunny and cop a junk needle in your kneecap.
August made me pancakes on my eighth birthday, served them up with maple syrup and a birthday candle that was actually just a thick white house candle. When we finished the pancakes, August made a gesture that said because it was my birthday we could do whatever I wanted. I asked if we could burn several things with my birthday candle, starting with the fungus-green loaf of bread that had been sitting in the fridge for what August and I had tracked at forty-three days.
August was everything back then. Mum, dad, uncle, grandma, priest, pastor, cook. He made us breakfast, he ironed our school uniforms, he brushed my hair, helped me with my homework. He started cleaning up after Lyle and Mum as they slept, hiding their drug bags and spoons, responsibly disposing of their syringes, with me always behind him saying, ‘Fuck all that, let’s go kick the footy.’
But August cared for Mum like she was a lost forest fawn learning to walk because August seemed to know some secret about it all, that it was all just a phase, a part of Mum’s story that we simply had to wait through. I think August believed she needed this phase, she deserved this drug rest, this big sleep, this time out of her brain, this time out from thinking about the past – her thirty-year slideshow of violence and abandonment and dormitory homes for wayward Sydney girls with bad dads. August combed her hair while she slept, pulled blankets over her chest, wiped drool from her mouth with tissues. August was her guardian and he’d clean me up in a flurry of pushes and punches if ever I stood in judgement and disgust. Because I didn’t know. Because nobody knew Mum but August.
These were Mum’s Debbie Harry ‘Heart of Glass’ years. People say junk makes you look horrific, that too much heroin tears your hair out, leaves scabs all over your face and your wrists from your anxious fingers and your anxious fingernails that keep filling with blood and rolled skin. People say the gear sucks the calcium out of your teeth and your bones, leaves you couch-bound like a rotting corpse. And I’d seen all that. But I also thought junk made Mum look beautiful. She was thin and pale white and blonde, not as blonde as Debbie Harry but just as pretty. I thought junk made Mum look like an angel. She had this fixed dazed look on her face, there but not there, like Harry in that ‘Heart of Glass’ clip, like something from a dream, moving in the space between sleeping and waking, between life and death, but sparkling somehow, like she had a mirror ball permanently spinning in the pupils of her sapphire eyes. And I remember thinking that’s how an angel really would look if they found themselves in suburban Darra, south-east Queensland, down all this way from heaven. Such an angel really would be dazed like that, puzzled, glassy, flapping her wings as she studied all those dishes piling up in the sink, all those cars passing by the house beyond the cracks in the curtains.
There’s a golden orb-weaver spider that builds a web outside my bedroom window so intricate and perfect that it looks like a single snowflake magnified a thousand times. The orb-weaver spider sits in the middle of the web like it’s parachuting sideways, suspended in the quest it keeps wanting to finish without needing to know the reason why, blown but not beaten by wind and rain and afternoon summer storms so strong they fell power poles. Mum was the orb-weaver spider in those years. And she was the web, and she was the butterfly too, the blue tiger butterfly with sapphire wings being eaten alive by the spider.
‘We need to get outta here, Gus.’
August hands me the flashlight