Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  ‘I don’t know, the stuff he says, the stuff he writes in the air with his magic finger wand. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense and sometimes it makes sense only two years later or a month later when it’s impossible for him to have known it would make sense.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Caitlyn Spies.’

  ‘Caitlyn Spies? Who’s Caitlyn Spies?’

  ‘That’s just the thing. We have no idea whatsoever, but ages ago Slim and I were messing around in the LandCruiser and we were watching August write his little messages in thin air and we caught him writing that name over and over. Caitlyn Spies. Caitlyn Spies. Caitlyn Spies. Then, last week, we read this big article in the South-West Star, this big “Queensland Remembers” spread, and it’s all about Slim, it’s the whole story of the Houdini of Boggo Road and it’s a really interesting piece and then we see the name of the woman who wrote it squeezed down in the bottom right-hand corner of the page.’

  ‘Caitlyn Spies,’ Mum says.

  ‘How’d you know?’

  ‘You were kinda setting it up for that, buddy.’

  She moves to her jewellery box on a white chest of drawers. ‘He’s obviously been reading her pieces in the local rag. He probably just liked how her name sounded in his mind. He does that, latches on to a name or a word and runs it over and over again in his mind. Just because he doesn’t speak words doesn’t mean he doesn’t love them.’

  She clutches two green gem earrings in her hand and leans down to me, talking softly and carefully.

  ‘That boy loves you more than he loves anything in this universe,’ she says. ‘When you were born . . .’

  ‘Yeah, I know, I know.’

  ‘. . . he watched over you so carefully, guarded your crib like all of human life depended on it. I couldn’t drag him away from you. He’s the best friend you will ever have.’

  She stands and turns to the mirror.

  ‘How do I look?’

  ‘You look beautiful, Mum.’

  Keeper of lightning. Goddess of fire and war and wisdom and Winfield Reds.

  ‘Mutton dressed up as lamb,’ she says.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I’m an old mutton dressing up as a young lamb.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ I say, frustrated.

  She sees my mood in the mirror.

  ‘Hey, I’m just joking,’ she says, fixing her earrings in.

  I hate it when she puts herself down, self-worth being, I believe, a fairly major root cause of everything from our living in this street to my outfit tonight, a yellow polo shirt and a pair of black slacks all purchased from the St Vincent de Paul Society opportunity shop in the neighbouring suburb of Oxley.

  ‘You’re too good for this place, you know,’ I say.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You’re too good for this house. You’re too smart for this town. You’re too good for Lyle. What are we doing here in this shithole? We shouldn’t even fucking be here.’

  ‘All right, thanks for the heads-up, matey. I think you can go finish getting ready now, huh?’

  ‘All those arseholes got the lamb because she always thought she was mutton.’

  ‘That’s enough now, Eli.’

  ‘You know you should have been a lawyer. You should have been a doctor. Not a fucking drug dealer.’

  Her hard slap hits my shoulder before she’s even turned around.

  ‘Get out of my room,’ she barks. Another slap on my shoulder with her right hand, then another with her left on the other shoulder.

  ‘Get the hell out of my room, Eli!’ she screams. Her teeth are gritted so tight I see the creases in her top lip, breathing hard, breathing deep.

  ‘Who are we kidding?’ I shout. ‘Watch my language? Watch my language? We’re fucking drug dealers. Drug dealers fucking swear. I’m sick of all these bullshit airs and graces you and Lyle go on with. Do your homework, Eli. Eat your fuckin’ broccoli, Eli. Tidy this kitchen, Eli. Study hard, Eli. Like we’re the fucking Brady Bunch or somethin’ and not just a dirty bunch of smack pushers. Give me a fucking bre—’

  Then I’m flying. Two hands grip my underarms from behind and I’m flying, hurled off Mum and Lyle’s bed, shoulders first, head second, into their bedroom door. I bounce off the door and drop to the polished wooden floorboards in a bone heap. Lyle looms above me and kicks me in the arse so hard with his Dunlop Volleys – his going-out shoes, one step up from his rubber flip-flops – that I belly slide two metres across the hallway floor to the bare feet of August who gives a curious This again? So soon? look to Lyle.

  ‘Fuck you, druggo cunt,’ I scream, rabid and groggy, trying to get to my feet.

  He kicks me in the arse again and I dive this time across the living room floor.

  Mum’s screaming behind him. ‘Stop it, Lyle, that’s enough.’

  Lyle’s got the red-mist rage I’ve had the misfortune of encountering thrice before. Once when I ran away from home and slept a night in an empty bus in a wrecker’s yard in Redlands. Another time when I stuck six cane toads in the freezer to die a humane death and those hardy and uneasy-on-the-eye amphibians survived in that sub-zero coffin all the way through to Lyle’s after-work rum and Coke and he opened the freezer to find two toads blinking on his ice tray. A third time when I joined a schoolmate, Jock Whitney, on a neighbourhood doorknock fundraising drive for the Salvation Army, except we were really fundraising to buy ET the Extra Terrestrial on Atari – I still feel rotten about that, the game was a piece of shit.

  August, dear, pure-of-heart August, stands in front of Lyle as he approaches for a third arse punt. He shakes his head, holding Lyle’s shoulders.

  ‘It’s all right, mate,’ Lyle says. ‘It’s time Eli and I had a little talk.’

  Lyle brushes past August and he hauls me up by the collar of my opportunity shop polo, then pushes me out the front door. He hauls me down the front stairs and along the path, through the gate, still holding my collar, his big streetfightin’ fists pushing against the back of my neck. ‘Keep walkin’, smartarse,’ he says. ‘Keep walkin’.’

  He takes me across the street, under the streetlight outshining the moon above us, into the park opposite our house. All I can smell is Lyle’s Old Spice aftershave. All I can hear is our footsteps and the sound of cicadas rubbing their legs, like they’re excited by the tension in the air, rubbing their legs the way Lyle rubs his hands before an Eels preliminary final.

  ‘What the fuck’s got into you, Eli?’ he asks, forcing me on across the cricket oval grass, unmown so my shoes keep kicking up the black fur of the tall paspalum grass shoots onto my pant legs. He walks me to the centre of the cricket pitch and he lets me go. He paces back and forth, fixing the buckle on his belt, breathing in, breathing out. He’s wearing his cream-coloured slacks with his blue cotton button-up shirt with the white tall ship cutting full mast across it.

  Don’t cry, Eli. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Fuck. You pussy, Eli.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ Lyle asks.

  ‘I don’t know, I really didn’t want to. My brain doesn’t listen to me.’

  I cry some more with this realisation. Lyle gives me a minute. I wipe my eyes.

  ‘You all right?’ Lyle asks.

  ‘Me arse stings a bit.’

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  I shrug. ‘I deserved it,’ I say.

  Lyle gives me another moment.

  ‘You ever wonder why you cry so easy, Eli?’

  ‘Because I’m a pussy.’

  ‘You’re not a pussy. Don’t you ever be ashamed of crying. You cry because you give a shit. Don’t ever be ashamed of giving a shit. Too many people in this world are too scared to cry because they’re too scared to give a shit.’

  He turns and looks up at the stars. He sits down on the cricket pitch for a better angle, looks up and takes in the universe, all that scattered space crystal.

  ‘You’re right about your mum,’ he says. ‘She’s way too good for me. Alway
s has been. Far as I’m concerned, she’s too good for anyone. She’s too good for that house. She’s too good for this town. Too good for me.’

  He points to the stars. ‘She belongs up there with Orion.’

  I park my tender arse down beside him.

  ‘You want to get out of here?’ he asks.

  I nod, stare up at Orion, the cluster of perfect light.

  ‘So do I, mate,’ he says. ‘Why do you think I been doing the extra work for Tytus?’

  ‘That’s a nice way of putting it. Extra work. I wonder if Pablo Escobar calls it that.’

  Lyle drops his head.

  ‘I know it’s a hell of a way to make a buck, mate.’

  We sit in silence for a moment. Then Lyle turns to me.

  ‘I’ll make you a deal.’

  ‘Yeah . . .’

  ‘Gimme six months.’

  ‘Six months?’

  ‘Where you wanna move to? Sydney, Melbourne, London, New York, Paris?’

  ‘I want to move to The Gap.’

  ‘The Gap? Why the fuck ya wanna move to The Gap?’

  ‘Nice cul-de-sacs in The Gap.’

  Lyle laughs.

  ‘Cul-de-sacs,’ he says, shaking his head. He turns to me, deeply serious. ‘It’ll get good, mate. It’ll get so good you’ll forget it was even bad.’

  I look up at the stars. Orion fixes his target and he draws his bow and he lets his arrow fly, straight and true through the left eye of Taurus and the raging bull is silenced.

  ‘Deal,’ I say. ‘Under one condition.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Lyle asks.

  ‘You let me work for you.’

  *

  We can walk to Bich Dang’s Vietnamese restaurant from home. The restaurant is called Mama Pham’s, named in honour of the stocky cooking genius, Mama Pham, who taught Bich how to cook in her native Saigon in the 1950s. The Mama Pham’s sign on the front is written in blinking lime green neon against an eastern red backdrop, but the neon ‘P’ is busted and dulled so the restaurant, for the past three years, has looked to passersby more like a pork and bacon–based restaurant named ‘Mama ham’s’. Lyle holds a six-pack of XXXX Bitter in his left hand and opens the Mama Pham’s front glass door for Mum, who slips past him in the red dress and the black heels from beneath her bed. August walks past next with his hair combed back carelessly and his pink Catchit T-shirt tucked into shiny silver-grey slacks, bought from the Darra Station Road opportunity shop seven or eight shops past the TAB down from Mama Pham’s.

  The inside of Mama Pham’s is as big as a cinema hall. There are more than twenty round dining tables with lazy Susans spinning for eight, ten, sometimes twelve people per table. Beautiful Vietnamese mums with made-up faces and immovable hair and normally quiet Vietnamese dads loosened and laughing heartily on beer and wine and tea. There are great beasts of the ocean lying sideways in the centre of each table, glazed and oiled and boiled and crumbed and salted and peppered, and whole deep-sea leviathans from the Mekong and beyond, Neptune maybe; big fat awkward bottom lips and slimy tentacle whiskers in colours of green and moss green and blue green and grey green and brown, black and red. Bich Dang owns acres of land at the back of Darra, beyond the Polish migrant centre, with soil like chocolate cake where her old and wrinkled and wise farmers grow the piles of rau ram coriander, shiso leaf, hung cay mint, basil, lemongrass and Vietnamese balm that guests pass between themselves tonight like they’re playing some children’s party game called Hands Across the Table. An oversized mirror ball twinkles above us and a Vietnamese lounge singer twinkles on stage, purple glitter make-up on her cheeks and a turquoise sequined dress that shimmers the way a mermaid’s scales might shimmer beached on the banks of the Mekong. She sings ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’ by The Carpenters, sways to the crackly backing track, alien somehow, like she just flew into Darra on the kind of craft she’s calling through that old microphone. Red tinsel lines the walls, running above fish tanks with catfish and cod and red emperor and fat snapper fish with balls on their heads that look like someone’s clubbed them with a cricket bat. There’s two more tanks dedicated to the crayfish and the mud crabs who always seem so resigned to the fact they’ll form tonight’s signature dish. They sit beneath their tank rocks and their cheap stone underwater novelty castle decorations, so breezy bayou casual all they’re missing is a harmonica and a piece of straw to chew on. They’re so unaware of their importance, so oblivious to the fact they’re the reason people drive from as far away as the Sunshine Coast to come taste their insides baked in salt and pepper and chilli paste.

  A staircase to the right of the restaurant runs up to a second balcony level with ten more round tables where ‘Back Off’ Bich Dang seats her VIP guests, and tonight there’s only one VIP and his name is stretched across the birthday banner running across the balcony rail of the top level: Happy 80th Tytus Broz.

  ‘Lyle Orlik, son of Aureli!’ Tytus Broz says grandly, his arms raised welcomingly in the air, standing over the balcony rail. ‘It seems Bich has pulled out all the bells, all the whistles and all the stops to celebrate my eighth decade on this good planet!’

  Tytus makes me think of bones. He wears a bone-white suit over a bone-white shirt and a bone-white tie. His shoes are brown polished leather and his hair is as bone white as his suit. His body is all bone, tall and thin, and he smiles like a skeleton frame would smile if it hopped off a Biology classroom hook and started to dance like Michael Jackson in the ‘Billie Jean’ clip August and I love like lemonade. Tytus’s cheekbones are round like the protruding balls on the heads of Bich Dang’s tank snapper, but his actual cheeks have been slowly sucked inwards over eighty years on earth and when his lips tremble – and they tremble all the time – it looks like he’s permanently sucking on a pistachio nut, or a vampire bat sucking on a human liver.

  Tytus Broz makes me think of bones because he’s made a fortune out of bones. Tytus Broz is Lyle’s boss at Human Touch, the Queensland prosthetics and orthotics sales centre and manufacturing plant he owns and runs in the suburb of Moorooka, ten minutes’ drive from our house. Lyle is a mechanic there, works maintenance on the machines that build artificial arms and legs for amputees across the State. Tytus Broz is the Lord of Limbs, whose vast natural arm reach has stretched across my and August’s lives for the past six years, ever since Lyle landed the Human Touch maintenance job through his best friend, Tadeusz ‘Teddy’ Kallas, the man with the thick black moustache seated four plastic white chairs to the right of Tytus at the VIP dining table. Teddy is also a maintenance mechanic at Human Touch. Teddy is also, I have long suspected, a man with a lucrative on-the-side stream of Tytus Broz’s ‘extra work’ that Lyle spoke of earlier this evening. The man sitting next to Teddy in a grey suit and maroon tie with black hair like a newsreader’s looks a hell of a lot like our local council member, Stephen Bourke, the man who sends us magnetised calendars each year that keep Mum’s shopping lists pinned to the refrigerator. He sips from a glass of white wine. Yeah, in fact, I’m certain that’s our local member. ‘Stephen Bourke – Your Local Leader’ the calendar reads. Stephen Bourke, right here at the table of Tytus Broz, ‘Your Local Dealer’.

  The thing about Tytus Broz that reminds me most of bones is that every time I see him – and this is only my second sighting of him – I get a shiver down my spine. He smiles at me now and he smiles at Mum and he smiles at August, but I don’t buy that pistachio-nut-sucker smile for a second. I don’t know why. Just something in my bones.

  *

  The first time I met Tytus Broz was two years ago when I was ten years old. Lyle was taking me and August to the roller-skating rink in Stafford, on the north side of Brisbane, but on the way he had to drop in to his work at Moorooka to fix a faulty lever on the machine that shaped the artificial arms and legs that paid for Tytus Broz’s bone-white suits. It was the old warehouse back then, before the business was overhauled into the whole Human Touch modern manufacturing plant of today. The warehouse was a
n aluminium shed the size of a tennis court, with giant ceiling fans to fight the suffocating heat of all that sun-baked metal housing a thousand fake limbs spread across hooks and shelves that led past plaster-makers casting body shapes and mechanics turning screws into fake bent knees and fake bent elbows.

  ‘Don’t touch anything,’ Lyle ordered as he led us past endless leg limbs standing in a row like a Moulin Rouge can-can troupe miraculously dancing without their torsos. We walked through rows of arms hanging on hooks from the ceiling and these arms had plastic hands that touched my face as we passed and I pictured those arms connected to the bodies of dead Arthurian knights impaled and hanging from long spears in the ground and their hands were reaching out for help that August and I could not give because Lyle insisted we didn’t touch anything, not even the reaching hand of the great Sir Lancelot du Lac. I saw those arms and legs coming alive, reaching at me, clutching for me, kicking at me. That warehouse was the end of a hundred bad horror movies, the start of a hundred nightmares I was yet to have.

  ‘These are Frances’s boys, August and Eli,’ Lyle said, ushering us into Tytus Broz’s office at the back of the warehouse. August was the taller and the older so he walked into the office first and it was August who captivated Tytus from the start.

  ‘Come closer, young man,’ Tytus said.

  August looked up at Lyle for assurance and an exit out of that moment, but Lyle didn’t give it, he just nodded at August like he should do what was polite and walk closer to the man who was putting the meat and three veg on our table every night.

  ‘Give me your hand,’ Tytus said from a swivel chair at a red-brown antique work desk. There was a framed painting of a giant white whale above this desk. It was Moby Dick, from what Lyle told me later was Tytus Broz’s favourite book, the one about the elusive whale hunted by an obsessive-compulsive amputee who could have benefited from having a Human Touch prosthetics and orthotics sales centre and warehouse in downtown Nantucket. I asked Slim soon after that if he’d ever read Moby Dick and he said he’d read it twice because it’s worth reading a second time, though he said second time around he skipped the bit where the writer goes on about all the different species of whales found across the world. I asked Slim to tell me the whole story from start to finish and for two hours while we washed his LandCruiser he told me that thrilling adventure tale so enthusiastically I wanted Nantucket fish chowder for lunch and white whale steaks for dinner. When he described Captain Ahab, with his wild-eyed face and his age and his thinness and his whiteness, I pictured Tytus Broz on that whale ship barking at his spotters high up in raging wind, demanding to see his prey, his white whale as white as Tytus Broz himself. Slim turned the LandCruiser into Moby Dick and the garden hose was the harpoon that he stabbed into the whale’s side and we grabbed onto the hose rubber for dear life as the whale dragged us into the abyss and the hose water became the ocean that would take us down, down, down to Poseidon, god of seas and garden hoses.