Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  August offered his right hand and Tytus cupped it gently in his own two hands.

  ‘Mmmmmmm,’ he said. With his forefinger and thumb he squeezed each of the fingers of August’s right hand, moving his way along the hand, thumb to pinkie.

  ‘Oh, there is a strength in you, isn’t there?’ he said.

  August said nothing.

  ‘I said, “There is a strength in you, boy, isn’t there?”’

  August said nothing.

  ‘Well . . . would you care to respond, young man?’ Tytus said, puzzled.

  ‘He doesn’t talk,’ Lyle said.

  ‘What do you mean he doesn’t talk?’

  ‘He hasn’t spoken a word since he was six years old.’

  ‘Is he simple?’ Tytus asked.

  ‘No, he’s not simple,’ Lyle said. ‘Sharp as a tack, in fact.’

  ‘He’s one of those autistic boys, is he? Can’t function in society but he can tell me how many grains of sand are in my hourglass?’

  ‘There’s nothin’ wrong with him,’ I said, frustrated.

  Tytus turned his swivel chair to me.

  ‘I see,’ he said, studying my face. ‘So you’re the talker of the family?’

  ‘I talk when there’s somethin’ worth talkin’ about,’ I said.

  ‘Wisely talked,’ Tytus said.

  He reached out his hand.

  ‘Give me your arm,’ he said.

  I held out my right arm and he gripped it with his soft and old hands, his palms so smooth it felt like they were covered in the Glad Wrap Mum kept in the third drawer down beneath the kitchen sink.

  He squeezed my arm hard. I looked at Lyle, he nodded assurance.

  ‘You’re scared,’ Tytus Broz said.

  ‘I’m not scared,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, you are, I can feel it in your marrow,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you mean my bones?’

  ‘No, your marrow, boy. You are weak-boned. Your bones are hard but your bones are not full.’

  He nodded at August. ‘Marcel Marceau’s bones are hard and they are also full. Your brother possesses a strength that you will never have.’

  August shot a smug and knowing smile at me. ‘But I’ve got great finger bone strength,’ I said, flipping August the bird.

  That was when I spotted the human hand resting on a metal prop on Tytus’s desk.

  ‘Is that real?’ I asked.

  The hand looked real and unreal at the same time. Severed and capped cleanly at the wrist, all five fingers looked like they were made of wax or wrapped in Glad Wrap like Tytus’s felt.

  ‘Yes, it is, in fact,’ Tytus said. ‘That is the hand of a sixty-five-year-old bus driver named Ernie Hogg who kindly donated his body to the Anatomy students of the University of Queensland whose recent investigations into plastination have been most enthusiastically sponsored by yours truly.’

  ‘What’s plastination mean?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s where we replace water and body fats inside the limb with certain curable polymers – plastics – to create a real limb that can be touched and studied up close and reproduced, but the dead donor limb does not smell or decay.’

  ‘That’s gross,’ I said.

  Tytus chuckled. ‘No,’ he said with a strange and unsettling wonder in his eyes, ‘that’s the future.’

  There was a pottery figurine of an ageing man in chains on his desk. The ageing man was wearing an Ancient Greek man dress, and had oil paint blood streaks across his exposed back. He was mid-stride, favouring a leg that was missing a foot and bandaged roughly.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  Tytus turned to the figurine.

  ‘That’s Hegesistratus,’ he said. ‘One of history’s great amputees. He was an Ancient Greek diviner capable of profound and dangerous things.’

  ‘What’s a diviner?’ I asked.

  ‘A diviner is many things,’ he said. ‘In Ancient Greece the diviners were more like seers. They could see things others could not see by interpreting signs from the gods. They could see things coming, a valuable skill in war.’

  I turned to Lyle. ‘That’s like Gus,’ I said.

  Lyle shook his head. ‘All right, that’ll do, mate.’

  ‘What do you mean, boy?’ Tytus asked.

  ‘Gus sees things, too,’ I said. ‘Like Hegesistaramus or whatever here.’

  Tytus cast a new eye over August, who gave a half-smile, shaking his head, moving backwards to stand beside Lyle.

  ‘What things exactly?’

  ‘Just crazy things that sometimes turn out to be true,’ I said. ‘He writes them in the air. Like when he wrote Park Terrace in the air and I wondered what the hell he was talking about, then Mum came home and told us she was standing at a set of traffic lights while she was shopping in Corinda when she saw an old woman just step right out into traffic. Right out there into the middle of it all, not giving a shit—’

  ‘Watch your language, Eli,’ Lyle said, cross at me.

  ‘Sorry. So Mum drops all her grocery bags and takes two steps forward and reaches for this old woman and yanks her back hard to the footpath just as a big council bus is about to clean her up. She saved the old lady’s life. And guess what street that happened on?’

  ‘Park Terrace?’ Tytus said, eyes wide.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It happened on Oxley Avenue, but then Mum walks this old lady back to her house a few blocks down the road and this old woman doesn’t say a word at all, just has this dazed look on her face. Then they come to this woman’s house and the front door is wide open and one of the old casement windows is banging hard in the wind and the old woman says she can’t go up the front stairs and Mum tries to guide her up there but she goes crazy, “No, no, no, no,” she screams. And nods to Mum like she should go up those stairs, and because Mum has hard and full bones too, she climbs those stairs and she walks into the house and all the casement windows on all four sides of this old Corinda Queenslander are banging in the wind and Mum paces through this house and into the kitchen where there’s a ham and tomato sandwich being eaten by flies and this whole house stinks of Dettol and something darker underneath, something fouler, and Mum keeps walking through the living room, down a hallway, all the way to the house’s main bedroom and the door is closed and she opens it and she’s almost knocked out by the smell of the old dead guy sitting in an armchair by a king-size bed, his head wrapped in a plastic bag and a gas tank by his side. And guess what street this house was on?’

  ‘Park Terrace,’ Tytus said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘The cops came to the house and they pieced together the whole story and they told Mum how the old woman had found her husband like that in the bedroom a month before and she was so cross at him because he told her he was going to do it but she demanded he didn’t and he defied her and she was so pissed off with him and shocked by the situation that she simply pretended he wasn’t there. She closed the door on the main bedroom for a month, spreading Dettol around the house to mask the smell as she went about her daily business like making ham and tomato sandwiches for lunch. Finally, when the smell got too much, reality kicked in and she opened all the windows in the house and walked straight down to Oxley Avenue to throw herself in front of a bus.’

  ‘So where did Park Terrace come in?’ Tytus asked.

  ‘Well, that had nothing to do with Mum. That was Lyle who copped a speeding fine on Park Terrace while driving to work that same day.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Tytus said.

  He looked at August, leaned forward in his swivel chair. There was something sinister in his eye then. He was old but he was threatening. It was the sucked-in cheekbones, the white hair, the something I felt in my weak bones. It was Ahab.

  ‘Well, young August, you budding diviner, do please tell me,’ he began, ‘what do you see when you look at me?’

  August shook his head, shrugged off the whole story.

  Tytus smiled. ‘I think I’ll keep my eye on you, August,’ he said, leaning ba
ck in his swivel chair.

  I turned back to the figurine.

  ‘So how did he lose his foot?’ I asked.

  ‘He was captured by the bloodthirsty Spartans and put in bonds,’ he said. ‘But he managed to escape by cutting his foot off.’

  ‘Bet they didn’t see that coming,’ I said.

  ‘No, young Eli, they did not,’ he said. He laughed. ‘So what does Hegesistratus teach us?’ he asked.

  ‘Always pack a hacksaw when you travel to Greece,’ I said.

  Tytus smiled. Then he turned to Lyle.

  ‘Sacrifice,’ he said. ‘Never grow attached to anything you can’t instantly separate yourself from.’

  *

  On Mama Pham’s upper floor dining area, Tytus places a hand on each of Mum’s shoulders and kisses her right cheek.

  ‘Welcome,’ he says. ‘Thank you for coming.’

  Tytus introduces Mum and Lyle to the woman seated directly to his right.

  ‘Please meet my daughter, Hanna,’ he says.

  Hanna stands from her seat. She’s dressed in white like her father, her hair is blonde-white, a kind of non-colour, as if all life has been sucked from it. She’s thin like her father.

  Her hair is straight and long and hangs over the shoulders of a white button-up top with sleeves running to the hands that she keeps below the table as she stands. Maybe she’s forty. Maybe she’s fifty, but then she speaks and maybe she’s thirty and shy.

  Lyle has told us about Hanna. She’s the reason he’s got a job. If Hanna Broz hadn’t been born with arms that ended at her elbows then Tytus Broz would never have been motivated to turn his small Darra auto-electrics warehouse into the home of his fledgling orthotics manufacturing shop which, in turn, grew into the Human Touch, a godsend for local amputees like Hanna, and a source of several community awards given to Tytus in the name of disability awareness.

  ‘Hi,’ Hanna says softly, giving a smile that would light small towns if it only had more time in use. Mum puts out a hand for shaking and Hanna meets it with a hand of her own raised from beneath the table, and this hand is no hand at all but an artificial limb beneath the white sleeve, and Mum doesn’t skip a beat as she grips that skin-coloured plastic hand and shakes it warmly. Hanna smiles, a little longer this time.

  Tytus Broz reminds me of bones because I am all bones and the other man who just caught my eye is stone. He’s all stone. A man of stone, staring at me. He wears a black short-sleeved button-up cotton shirt. He’s old but not as old as Tytus. Maybe he’s fifty. Maybe he’s sixty. He’s one of those hard men Lyle knows, muscular and grim – you could chop him in half and measure his age by the growth rings in his insides. He’s just staring at me now this guy. All this activity around this circular dining table and here’s this stone man staring at me with his big nose and his thin eyes and his silver hair that is long and pulled back into a ponytail but the hair only starts halfway along his scalp so it looks like this long silver hair is being sucked from his cranium with a vacuum cleaner. Slim’s always talking about this, the little movies within the movie of your own life. Life lived in multiple dimensions. Life lived from multiple vantage points. One moment in time – several people meeting at a circular dining table before taking their seats – but a moment with multiple points of view. In these moments time doesn’t just move forward, it can move sideways, expanding to accommodate infinite points of view, and if you add up all these vantage point moments you might have something close to eternity passing sideways within a single moment. Or something like that.

  Nobody sees this moment the way I see it, defined as it will be for the rest of my life by the silver-haired creep with the ponytail.

  ‘Iwan,’ calls Tytus Broz, his left hand on Lyle’s shoulder, pointing at August, who is standing beside me. ‘This is the boy I was telling you about. He doesn’t talk, like you.’ The man Tytus calls Iwan shifts his focus from me to August.

  ‘I talk,’ says the man Tytus calls Iwan.

  The man Tytus calls Iwan shifts his eyes to a glass of beer before him, which he then grips tightly with his right hand and brings slow as a chairlift to his lips. He drinks half the glass in a single sip. Maybe the man Tytus calls Iwan is actually two hundred years old. Nobody’s ever been able to cut him in half to be sure.

  Bich Dang approaches the table, calling from afar. She wears a sparkling emerald gown that hugs her torso and legs all the way to her hidden feet so when she walks across Mama Pham’s upper-floor dining area it looks like she’s hovering over to our table. Darren Dang shuffles over in her wake, visibly troubled by the smart black coat and pants he’s not so much wearing as enduring.

  ‘Welcome people, welcome, welcome, sit, sit,’ she says. She puts an arm around Tytus Broz. ‘Now I hope you have brought your appetites. I have prepared more hot dinners for tonight than this one has had hot dinners.’

  *

  Points of view. Vantage points. Angles. Mum in her red dress, laughing with Lyle as she drops chunks of crispy tilapia onto her plate. The tilapia has been drowned in a garlic and chilli and coriander sauce, so many exposed white bones in its charred and thorny dorsal fin that they look like the ivory keys in the warped piano organ the devil plays in hell.

  Tytus Broz resting an arm over his daughter, Hanna, as he talks to our local member, Stephen Bourke, who wrestles with a chopstick clump of Vietnamese lemongrass beef noodle salad.

  Lyle’s best friend, Teddy, staring across the table at my mum.

  Bich Dang bringing another dish to the table.

  ‘Braised snakehead!’ she beams.

  Darren Dang is seated on my left and August is on my right. The three of us are eating spring rolls. The man Tytus calls Iwan is across the table, sucking the flesh from a bright orange chilli crab claw.

  ‘Iwan Krol,’ Darren says, keeping his head down as he chomps into a spring roll.

  ‘Huh?’ I say.

  ‘Stop staring at him,’ Darren says, his head darting anywhere but in the direction of the man Tytus calls Iwan.

  ‘He gives me the creeps,’ I say.

  It’s loud at this table. The restaurant noise, between the lounge singer on the dining floor below us and the drink-fuelled chat of our table guests and the cackling howl of Bich Dang’s laughter, has caused a kind of invisible sound booth to form around Darren and me, allowing us to talk freely about the people sitting around us.

  ‘That’s what he’s paid to do,’ Darren says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Give people the creeps.’

  ‘What do you mean? What does he do?’

  ‘By day, he runs a llama farm in Dayboro.’

  ‘Llama farm?’

  ‘Yeah, I been there. He’s got all these llamas on his farm. Crazy fuckin’ animals, like a donkey had sex with a camel. They got these big yellow bottom teeth, like the worst case for braces you ever saw. The teeth are so bad you give ’em half an apple they can’t bite into it, they just have to roll it around their tongue like it’s a gobstopper or somethin’.’

  ‘And by night . . .?’

  ‘By night, he gives people the creeps.’

  Darren spins the lazy Susan on our table and brings a bowl of salt and pepper baked mud crab to our places. He takes a claw and three crispy crab legs and lays them in his small bowl of rice.

  ‘That’s his job?’ I ask.

  ‘Shit yeah it is,’ Darren says. ‘He’s got one of the most important jobs in the whole operation.’ Darren shakes his head. ‘Jeez, Tink, you’re one green-arse drug dealer’s son.’

  ‘I told you, Lyle’s not me dad.’

  ‘Sorry, forgot he’s your temp dad.’

  I take a salt and pepper crab claw and bite it with my big back teeth, and the baked crab shell breaks like an eggshell breaks under pressure. If Darra had a flag that we residents could wave in solidarity then a soft-shelled salted and peppered mud crab would have to feature on it somewhere.

  ‘How does he give people the creeps?’ I ask.

  ‘
Reputation and rumours, Mum says,’ Darren explains. ‘Anyone can get a reputation, of course. Just walk outside and stick a knife in the neck of the next poor bastard you see in the street.’

  Darren turns the lazy Susan again, stops it spinning at a bowl of fishcakes.

  I can’t stop staring at Iwan Krol, picking crab shell gristle from his big straight tobacco-stained teeth.

  ‘Sure, Iwan Krol has done his share of bad shit that everybody knows about,’ Darren says. ‘A bullet in the back of a head here, a hydrochloric acid bath there, but it’s the shit we don’t know about that scares people. It’s the rumours that build up around a guy like Iwan Krol that do half the work for him. It’s the rumours that give people the creeps.’

  ‘What rumours?’

  ‘You haven’t heard the rumours?’

  ‘What rumours, Darren?’

  He looks over at Iwan Krol. He leans in close to me.

  ‘Dem bones,’ Darren whispers. ‘Dem bones, dem bones.’

  ‘The fuck ya talkin’ ’bout?’

  He takes two crab legs, makes them dance on his table like human legs.

  ‘The toe bone’s connected to the foot bone,’ he sings. ‘The foot bone’s connected to the ankle bone, the ankle bone’s connected to the leg bone, now shake dem skeleton bones.’

  Darren bursts into laughter. He reaches out a sharp hand and grips my neck, squeezes hard. ‘Neck bone’s connected to the head bone,’ he sings. He puts a fist on my forehead. ‘Head bone’s connected to the dick bone.’