Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  I will remember the plan.

  ‘Ummm . . . okay,’ I say.

  She opens a drawer on the right of her office desk and she retrieves a rolled sheet of butcher’s paper, fixed in place by a rubber band.

  ‘This is a painting your brother created in art class two days ago,’ she says.

  She rolls the rubber band off the paper, the rubber snapping against the paper as she rolls it. She spreads the paper out and shows me the painting.

  It’s a vivid image in blues and greens and purples. August has painted the sky-blue Holden Kingswood resting on an ocean floor. Tall emerald reeds surround the car, a seahorse gallops across the underwater scene. August has painted my dream.

  ‘Who is that, Eli?’ Mrs Birkbeck asks, pointing to the painted man sitting in the front seat.

  I will remember the plan.

  ‘That’s my dad, I guess,’ I say.

  ‘And who is that?’ she asks, pointing to the Kingswood’s back seat.

  I will remember the plan.

  ‘That’s August.’

  ‘And who is that?’

  I will remember the plan.

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘I see,’ Mrs Birkbeck says gently. ‘And tell me, Eli, why are you all sleeping?’

  This could really upset the plan.

  Boy Seeks Help

  Five days to Christmas and I can’t sleep. We have no curtains or blinds on our bedroom’s single sliding window and the blue post-midnight moonlight falls on August’s right arm hanging over his bed. I can’t sleep because my mattress is itchy and smells like piss. Dad was given the mattress by Col Lloyd, an Aboriginal man who lives five houses up on Lancelot Street with his wife, Kylie, and their five kids, the eldest of whom, twelve-year-old Ty, slept upon this orange foam mattress before me. The smell of piss keeps me up but what woke me was the plan.

  ‘Gus, you hear that?’

  Gus says nothing.

  It’s a moaning sound. ‘Huuuuuuuuuuuuu.’

  I think it’s Dad. He’s not drinking tonight because he’s coming off a three-day bender. He got so spectacularly pissed on the first night of the bender that August and I were able to crawl under the gap beneath the living room lounge while he was watching The Outlaw Josey Wales on television and we tied the shoelaces of his Dunlop Volleys together so that when he stood up to abuse one of the many villainous Union men who foolishly killed Clint Eastwood’s on-screen wife and child he would fall down heavily, crashing over the coffee table. He fell over three times before he realised his shoelaces were tied, at which point he vowed – through a largely incoherent barrage of slurred words and at least twenty-three ‘cunts’ – to bury us alive in the backyard beside the dead macadamia nut tree. ‘As fuckin’ if,’ August wrote in the air with his forefinger, shrugging his shoulders as he got up to turn the TV over to Creepshow, which was showing on Channel Seven. On the second day of the bender, Dad put on his jeans and a button-up shirt and, with a second wind brought about by six Saturday-morning rum and Cokes and a splash of Brut cologne, he caught the 522 bus, without saying where exactly he was going. He came home that night at 10 p.m. while August and I were watching Stripes on Channel Nine. He walked through the back door, straight through the kitchen to the cabinet where he keeps the telephone he never answers. Beneath the telephone is the important drawer. This is the drawer where he keeps unpaid bills, paid bills, our birth certificates and his Serepax tablets. He opened the important drawer and retrieved a dog chain leash that he wrapped methodically around his right fist. He didn’t even acknowledge August and me sitting on the lounge when he turned the television off followed by every light in the house. He walked to the front window and drew the old frilly cream-coloured curtains closed, peering out the crack where the two curtains met.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, feeling sick in the stomach. ‘Dad, what is it?’

  He simply sat down on the lounge in darkness and tightened the dog chain around his fist. His head flopped dizzily about for a moment, then he focused on his raised left forefinger which he brought, with great concentration, to his mouth. ‘Sssssssshhhhhhh,’ he said. We didn’t sleep that night. August and I let our imaginations run wild guessing at what dangerous entity or entities he had offended enough to warrant the dog leash fist-wrapping: some goon at the pub, some hulk on the way to the pub, some killer on the way home from the pub, every single person inside the pub, ninjas, Yakuza, Joe Frazier, Sonny and Cher, God and the Devil. August wondered what the Devil would look like standing at our door. I said he would wear light blue flip-flops and sport a mullet cut with a rat’s tail and a Balmain Tigers beanie to hide his horns. August said the Devil would wear a white suit with white shoes and white hair and white teeth and white skin. August said the Devil would look like Tytus Broz and I said that name felt like something from a different world, a different time and place that we didn’t belong to any more. All we belonged to was 5 Lancelot Street.

  ‘Another Gus and Eli,’ he said. ‘Another universe,’ he said.

  Dad spent the following morning sitting on the kitchen floor by the entrance to the laundry rewinding and playing, rewinding and playing, rewinding and playing ‘Ruby Tuesday’ on a cassette tape until the tape jammed in the player and the reel of brown tape unspooled in his hands like a mess of curled brown hair. August and I were eating Weet-Bix at the kitchen table as we watched him hopelessly attempt to fix the tape but succeed only in pulling the tape further and further into chaotic and irreparable oblivion. This forced him to resort to his Phil Collins tapes, the only point in the whole drunken three-day domestic nightmare when August and I genuinely considered notifying the Department of Child Safety. The vivid and violent bender climaxed at 11 a.m. that morning with a spectacular blood and bile vomit over the kitchen’s peach-coloured linoleum floor. He passed out so close to his own abstract gut spillage that I was able to take hold of his arm and extend his right forefinger so I could use it as a pencil to write a message he would have to see when he woke up sober. I dragged and swished his forefinger through the foul-smelling vomit to form a capital-letters message straight from the heart: SEEK HELP DAD.

  *

  ‘Huuuuuuuuuuuu.’ The sound slips under the crack of our bedroom door.

  Then a desperate call, frail and familiar.

  ‘August,’ Dad calls from his bedroom.

  I shake August’s arm. ‘August,’ I say.

  He doesn’t stir.

  ‘August,’ Dad calls. But the call is soft and weak. More a moan than a call.

  I walk to his bedroom door in darkness, switch on his light, my eyes adjusting to the brightness.

  He’s clutching his chest with both hands. He’s hyperventilating. He speaks between short, sharp breaths.

  ‘Call . . . an . . . ambulance,’ he says.

  ‘What’s wrong, Dad?’ I bark.

  He sucks for air he can’t find. Gasping. His whole body trembling.

  He moans. ‘Huuuuuuuuuu.’

  I run down the hall, dial triple zero on the phone.

  ‘Police or ambulance?’ asks a woman on the phone.

  ‘Ambulance.’

  The phone patches through to a different voice.

  ‘What’s your emergency?’

  My father is gonna die and I’ll never get any answers from him.

  ‘I think my dad’s having a heart attack.’

  *

  Dad’s next-door neighbour on the left, a sixty-five-year-old taxi driver named Pamela Waters, is drawn out to the street by the flashing lights of the arriving ambulance, her unwieldy breasts threatening to spill from her maroon nightgown. Two ambulance officers lift a gurney from the back of the ambulance and leave it by the letterbox.

  ‘Everything all right, Eli?’ asks Pamela Waters, fixing the satin belt of her gown.

  ‘Not sure,’ I say.

  ‘Another turn,’ she says knowingly.

  What the fuck does that mean?

  The ambulance officers, one carrying an oxygen tank and
mask, rush past August and me, standing barefoot in our matching white singlets and pyjama shorts.

  ‘He’s in the room at the end of the hall,’ I call.

  ‘We know, buddy, he’ll be all right,’ says the oldest ambulance officer.

  We go inside and stand at the living room end of the hall, listening to the ambulance officers in the bedroom.

  ‘C’mon, Robert, breathe,’ hollers the oldest officer. ‘C’mon, mate, you’re safe now. Nothing to worry about.’

  Sucking sounds. Heavy breathing.

  I turn to August.

  ‘They’ve been here before?’

  August nods.

  ‘There ya go,’ says the younger ambulance officer. ‘That’s better, isn’t it?’

  They carry him out of the bedroom and down the hall, an arm each under his thighs, the way the Parramatta Eels forwards carry the starry halves in grand final celebrations.

  They haul him onto the gurney, Dad’s face pressed to the gas mask like it was a long-lost lover.

  ‘You all right, Dad?’ I ask.

  And I don’t know why I care so much. Something deep inside me. Something dormant. Something pulling me towards the crazed drunk.

  ‘I’m all right, mate,’ he says.

  And I know that tone in his voice. I remember that tenderness in the tone. I’m all right, Eli. I’m all right, Eli. I will remember this scene. Him on a gurney like this. I’m all right, Eli. I’m all right. The tone of it.

  ‘I’m sorry you boys had to see this,’ he says. ‘I’m fucked, I know, mate. I’m fucked at this dad stuff. But I’m gonna fix meself, all right. I’m gonna fix meself.’

  I nod. I want to cry. I don’t want to cry. Don’t cry.

  ‘It’s okay, Dad,’ I say. ‘It’s okay.’

  The ambulance officers load him into the back of their vehicle.

  Dad sucks some more gas, pulls the mask away.

  ‘There’s a frozen shepherd’s pie in the freezer you can have for dinner tomorrow night,’ he says.

  He sucks again on the mask. His eyes catch sight of Pamela gawking in her nightgown. He sucks enough air into his lungs to say something loud.

  ‘Take a fuckin’ Polaroid, Pam,’ he barks, wheezing with the effort. Dad’s flipping Pamela Waters the middle finger when the officers close the rear ambulance doors.

  *

  The next morning there is an ibis walking through our front yard. It’s favouring its left leg, which is wrapped in fishing line at the base where its prehistoric black claw foot begins. The crippled ibis. August watches the ibis through the living room window. He holds his Casio calculator, taps some numbers and holds the calculator upside down: ‘IBISHELL’.

  I type in 5378804, turn it upside down: ‘HOBBLES’.

  ‘I’ll be back before dinner,’ I say. August nods, staring out to the ibis. ‘Save me some pie,’ I say.

  Down the left side ramp, past the black wheelie bin. Dad’s rusting bicycle leans against a concrete stump holding the house up beside the tan cylinder of the hot water system. Beyond the bicycle is the vast below-the-house dump of Dad’s collected gallery of ancient household white goods – washing machines with engines like the ones used by QANTAS, disintegrating refrigerators filled with redback spiders and brown snakes, and discarded car doors and seats and wheels. The grass of the backyard is beyond mowing now, towering and leaning straw-coloured shoots so thick I can picture Colonel Hathi the elephant and Mowgli parting them on their way to the Big Rooster on Barrett Street. Only a machete could bring it all down now; an accidental fire, maybe. What a fuckin’ shithole. 008. ‘BOO’. 5514. ‘HISS’.

  *

  The bike is a rusting black 1976 Malvern Star ‘Sport Star’ model, made in Japan. The seat is split and keeps pinching my arse cheeks. It goes quick but it would go quicker if Dad hadn’t gone and replaced the original handlebars with handlebars from a 1968 women’s Schwinn. The brakes don’t work so I have to break by jamming my right Dunlop between the front wheel and front wheel brace.

  It’s been raining and the sky is grey and a rainbow arches over Lancelot Street, promising everybody here a beginning and an end in seven perfect colours. Red and yellow and Vivian Hipwood in 16 Lancelot Street, whose baby died of cot death and for seven days she continued to dress it and nurse it and rattle toys in front of its blue face. Pink and green and number 17, where sixty-six-year-old Albert Lewin tried to gas himself in his sealed garage but couldn’t get the job done because he was only gassing himself with a rattling lawnmower because he’d sold his car two months before to pay for the vet surgery bills for his boxer dog, Jaws, who’d been put down two days before Albert pushed his green Victa into his garage. Purple and orange and black and blue: all the mums along Lancelot Street on a Saturday morning smoking Winfield Reds at the kitchen table hoping the kids don’t spot the purple and orange and black and blue bruising beneath the concealer on their cheekbones. The concealer. The concealers. The concealed. Lester Crowe in 32 Lancelot Street, who stabbed his pregnant girlfriend, Zoe Penny, thirteen times in the stomach with a heroin syringe to kill his unborn daughter. The Munk brothers in 53 Lancelot Street who tied their father to a living room armchair and cut half his ear off with a tomahawk. When it’s so hot in summer on this endless street and the Brisbane City Council has laid new bitumen over potholes that explode in frustration, the tar sticks to the rubber of your Dunlops like Hubba Bubba bubble gum and everybody pulls open their curtains despite all the mosquitos blowing in from the Brighton and Shorncliffe mangroves and this whole street becomes a theatre and all those living rooms are window-framed to become televisions playing a live daytime soap opera called Thank God It’s Dole Day and a ribald comedy called Pass the Chicken Salt and a police procedural drama called The Colour of a Two-Cent Piece. Fists are thrown through these front window theatre screens and laughs are had and tears are shed. Boo fuckin’ hiss. Boo fuckin’ hoo.

  ‘Hey, Eli.’

  It’s Shelly Huffman, leaning out her bedroom window, blowing cigarette smoke to the side of her house.

  I jam my shoe in the front wheel and pull a U-turn in the middle of the street and guide Dad’s rickety Malvern Star into Shelly’s driveway. Her dad’s car isn’t in the carport.

  ‘Hey, Shelly,’ I say.

  She drags on the cigarette, blows seasoned O-rings on the exhale.

  ‘You want a drag?’

  I suck two drags and blow them out.

  ‘You by yourself?’ I ask.

  She nods.

  ‘They all went to Kings Beach for Bradley’s birthday,’ she says.

  ‘Didn’t you want to go?’

  ‘I did, Eli Bell, but it’s this ol’ bag o’ bones,’ Shelly says, adopting the voice of an old American grandmother from the Wild West, ‘she don’t walk too well across sand no more.’

  ‘So they left you home alone?’

  ‘My aunt’s comin’ soon to babysit,’ she says. ‘I told Mum I’d prefer the dog motel on Fletcher Street.’

  ‘I hear they give you three meals a day,’ I say.

  She laughs, stubs the cigarette out on the underside of the windowsill, flicks the butt into the garden running along the neighbour’s fence line.

  ‘Heard the ambos took your old man to hospital last night,’ she says.

  I nod.

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘I don’t know, really,’ I say. ‘He just started shakin’. Couldn’t speak or nothin’. Couldn’t catch a breath.’

  ‘A panic attack,’ she says.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Panic attack,’ she says casually. ‘Yeah, Mum used to get ’em, few years ago. She went through a bad patch where she didn’t wanna do anything, ever, because she’d start having panic attacks if she went out among too many people. She’d wake up feeling on top of the world and tell us she’d take us all to the movies at Toombul Shoppingtown, then we’d get all dolled up and she’d have a panic attack the minute she sat in the car.’

  ‘How did she get o
ver them?’

  ‘I got diagnosed with MD,’ she says. ‘She had to get over them then.’ She shrugs. ‘See, that’s called perspective, Eli,’ she says. ‘A bee sting smarts like a bitch until someone clubs you with a cricket bat. And speaking of the ol’ English willow, you wanna game of Test Match? I’ll let you be the West Indies.’

  ‘Nah, can’t,’ I say. ‘I’m gonna meet someone.’

  ‘This part of the big secret plan?’ she smiles.

  ‘You know about the plan?’

  ‘Gus wrote it all out for me in the air,’ she says.

  That pisses me off. I look up to the grey sky.

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t say a word,’ she says. ‘But I think you’re fuckin’ nuts.’

  I shrug.

  ‘Probably am,’ I say. ‘Mrs Birkbeck thinks I am.’

  Shelly rolls her eyes. ‘Mrs Birkbeck thinks we’re all nuts.’

  I smile.

  ‘It is nuts, Eli . . .’ she says. And she looks at me with a pretty smile, all heart and sincerity. ‘But it’s sweet too.’

  And for a moment I want to drop the plan and go inside and sit on Shelly Huffman’s bed playing Test Match, and if she hit a six by her favourite batsman, the dashing South African Kepler Wessels, with the small ballbearing cricket ball cutting through the ‘six’ space in the left corner of the octagonal green felt cricket ground, we could celebrate with a hug and because her family is all out and because the sky is grey we could fall back on her bed and we could kiss and maybe I could drop the plan forever – drop Tytus Broz, drop Lyle, drop Slim and Dad and Mum and August – and just spend the rest of my life caring for Shelly Huffman as she fights that unfair and imbalanced arsehole God who gives Iwan Krol two strong arms to kill with and gives Shelly Huffman two legs that can’t walk across the golden sand of Kings Beach, Caloundra.

  ‘Thanks, Shelly,’ I say, wheeling the Malvern Star back out her driveway.

  Shelly calls from her window as I speed away. ‘Stay sweet, Eli Bell.’

  *

  Lyle told me once they used concrete from the Queensland Cement and Lime Company in Darra to build the Hornibrook Bridge. He said it was the longest bridge built over water in the Southern Hemisphere, stretching more than two and a half kilometres from seaside Brighton to the glorious seaside peninsula of Redcliffe, home of the Bee Gees and the Redcliffe Dolphins rugby league club. The bridge has two humps on it, one at the Brighton end and one at the Redcliffe end, where boats sailing along Bramble Bay can slip underneath it.