Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  I chuckle at this. She laughs, raising a finger to her mouth. ‘Sssshhh, you gotta stay quiet as a mouse, you hear me?’

  I nod.

  ‘Do you know where my mum is?’

  She nods.

  ‘How is she?’

  Bernie stares at me. There’s a tattooed star formation on her left temple.

  ‘Oh, sweet Eli,’ she says, her hands cupping my chin. ‘Your mum has told us about you. She told us how special you and your brother are. And we all heard how you wuz tryin’ to get here to see your mum but your old man wasn’t havin’ it.’

  I shake my head. My eyes catch a box of red apples on the kitchen bench.

  ‘You hungry?’ Bernie asks.

  I nod.

  She steps to the apple box, wipes one on her prison pants the way Dennis Lillee shines a cricket ball, throws me the apple.

  ‘You want me to fix you a sandwich or somethin’?’ she asks.

  I shake my head.

  ‘We got Corn Flakes in here. I think Tanya Foley down in D Block has a box of Froot Loops she had smuggled in. I could rustle up a bowl of Froot Loops for ya.’

  I bite into the apple, juicy and crisp. ‘The apple’s great, thanks,’ I say. ‘Can I go see her?’

  She sighs, pulls herself up onto the steel kitchen workbench, neatens out her prison shirt.

  ‘No, Eli, you can’t just go see her,’ she says. ‘You can’t just go see her because, and I don’t know if you’ve worked this out just yet, this is a fuckin’ women’s prison, matey, and it’s not some fuckin’ summer holiday resort where you can just wander on across to B Block and ask the concierge to page your fuckin’ mum. Now, get this straight, you’ve only come this far because Slim begged me to let you come this far and you better start telling me why I should let this crackpot adventure of yours go any further.’

  The sound of a choir echoes outside the kitchen.

  ‘What is that?’ I ask.

  A beautiful choir. Angel voices. A Christmas song.

  ‘That’s the Salvos,’ Bernie says. ‘They’re singin’ up a storm next door in the rec room.’

  ‘They come every Christmas?’

  ‘If we’ve been good little elves,’ she says.

  The song gets louder, three-part harmonies squeezing through the crack beneath the door to Bernie’s Jailbirds restaurant.

  ‘What’s that song they’re singing?’

  ‘You can’t hear it?’

  Bernie starts to sing. ‘Sleigh bells ring, are you listening, In the lane, snow is glistening. A beautiful sight, we’re happy tonight. Walking in a winter wonderland.’ That song. That fucking song. She slides off the bench, moves closer to me, a dumb look on her face. She sways to me, smiling. Something about her smile is unsettling. There’s madness in Bernie. She’s looking at me but she’s looking through me too. ‘Gone away is the blue bird,’ she sings. ‘Here to stay is the new bird . . .’

  There’s a knock on the closed kitchen door.

  ‘Come in,’ Bernie calls.

  A woman in her twenties enters the kitchen. She has blonde tufts of hair at the front of her scalp and blonde tufts of hair at the base of her scalp and the rest of the hair in between has been shaved in a crewcut. Her arms and legs are bone with no meat and her beaming smile to me when she enters the kitchen is the greatest gift I’ve received so far this increasingly unusual Christmas Day. Then her smile fades when she turns to Bernie.

  ‘She’s not coming out,’ the woman says. ‘She’s fuckin’ vacant, Bern. She’s just staring at the wall, like she’s dead to the world inside her head. She’s not there at all.’

  The woman looks at me. ‘Sorry,’ she says.

  ‘Did you tell her he’s standing right here in the kitchen?’ Bernie asks.

  ‘Nah, I couldn’t,’ she says. ‘Lord Brian’s letting her keep the door closed. He’s worried she’ll ’ave another spac attack.’

  Bernie drops her head, thinking. She raises her arm at the woman, her head still down. ‘Eli, this is Debbie,’ she says.

  Debbie smiles at me again.

  ‘Merry Christmas, Eli,’ Debbie says.

  ‘Merry Christmas, Debbie,’ I say.

  Bernie lifts her head, turns to me.

  ‘Look, kid, you want it straight or you want it with the chocolate sauce and the cherry on top?’ Bernie asks.

  ‘Straight,’ I say.

  She sighs.

  ‘She doesn’t look good, Eli,’ she says. ‘She hasn’t been eatin’ nothin’. She won’t come out of her cell. I can’t remember the last time she went outside for 3 p.m. rec. She was doin’ cooking classes with me here for a bit but she stopped doin’ that. She’s in a dark place, Eli.’

  ‘I know she is,’ I say. ‘That’s why I asked Slim to get me in here.’

  ‘But she doesn’t want you seeing her that way, you understand me?’ she says.

  ‘I know she doesn’t want to see me,’ I say. ‘I know that. But the thing is, Bernie, she does want to see me even though she doesn’t want to see me and I need to go down there and tell her everything is gonna be all right because when I tell her that everything will be all right – that’s what always happens. It always turns out all right when I tell her it’s going to.’

  ‘So, let me get this straight, you just go out there and tell your mum it’s all gonna be peachy for her inside this shithole and,’ Bernie clicks her fingers, ‘voilà, everything is all right for Frankie Bell?’

  I nod.

  ‘Just like that?’ she asks.

  I nod.

  ‘Like magic?’

  I nod.

  ‘You some kinda magic man, Eli?’ she asks.

  I shake my head.

  ‘Nah, come on, little cuz, maybe you’re the new Houdini of Boggo Road?’ she says mockingly. ‘Maybe Slim sent us all the new Houdini to magically bust us all outta here. Can you do that, Eli? Maybe you could wave your wand and you could magic me right out to Dutton Park train station and I could go see one of my kids. I got five of ’em out there somewhere. I’d be happy to see just one of ’em. Me youngest maybe. Kim. How old would Kim be now, ya reckon, Deb?’

  Debbie shakes her head.

  ‘C’mon, Bern,’ she says. ‘Poor kid’s come this far. Let’s just take him to see his mum. It’s Christmas, for fuck’s sake.’

  Bernie turns to me.

  ‘She just needs to see me for a minute,’ I say.

  ‘I’m just looking out for your mum, kid,’ she says. ‘No mother in the world wants her kid to see her like she is right now. Why should I let you go down there and hurt her even more than she’s already hurtin’, you know, just to make your Christmas Day a little merrier?’

  And I stare so deep and serious into her eyes I can see her steely soul. ‘Because I don’t know magic, Bernie,’ I say. ‘Because I don’t know anything about anything. But I know what my mum told you about my brother and me was right.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Bernie asks.

  ‘We’re special.’

  *

  The prisoners of B Block are performing a musical this Christmas Day on a makeshift stage in the recreation room, and the ladies from blocks C, D, E and the F Block temporary huts, where spillover newcomers go when the main cells are full, have all gathered for a joyous and well received post-lunch Christmas concert. The B Block Christmas performance is a fusion of the Nativity story and the musical Grease. The play features two female cons playing Mary and Joseph in the guise of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. The three wise men are all members of the Pink Ladies gang. Baby Jesus is a doll dressed in leathers, and instead of spending a night in a manger the future lord and saviour rests up in the boot of a cardboard Greased Lightning. The musical is called When a Child is Born to Hand Jive.

  The play’s climactic showstopper, Mary singing ‘You’re the One That I Want For Christmas’, brings the house down and a thunderous cheer echoes through B Block. Even the screws, three heavyset men in green-brown uniforms standing at triangular points a
round the knee-slapping audience, find themselves immersed in the riotous cabaret stylings of the woman playing Mary in stick-on black leggings.

  ‘All right, let’s go,’ whispers Bernie, making the most of the play’s magnetic and colourful all-eyes-on-stage distraction.

  I’m tucked inside a large black wheelie bin and Bernie is pulling me along, the bin’s lid closed above me. My feet squash down paper plates cleared from the prison dining tables at Christmas lunch. I’m up to my ankles in leftovers of canned ham and tinned peas and corn. She wheels me out of the prison kitchen area, past the dining room, crosses an open floor space behind the rec room, scurries past the audience with its head turned to Mary. She turns the bin on a sharp right and my body is mashed against the greasy and foul-smelling inside walls. She scurries thirty or forty paces along and sits the bin upright again, opens the lid, pops her head inside.

  ‘What’s my name?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  ‘How the fuck did you get inside this place?’

  ‘I attached myself to the bottom of one of the delivery trucks.’

  ‘Which truck?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘The white one.’

  Bernie nods.

  ‘Outcha get,’ she whispers.

  I stand up out of the bin. We’re in a cell block corridor lit only by the light of a frosted glass floor-to-ceiling window at the end of the corridor, some eight prison cells along. Each cell has a rectangular hard-glass window panel the size of Dad’s letterbox built into the centre of it.

  I slip out of the bin, my backpack still over my shoulders. Bernie nods to the cell two doors along the corridor.

  ‘It’s that one,’ she says. She closes the lid on the bin and scurries away.

  ‘You’re on your own now, Houdini,’ she whispers. ‘Merry Christmas.’

  ‘Thanks Bernie,’ I whisper.

  I approach Mum’s cell. The door’s window is too high up for me to see into, even on the tips of my toes. But there’s a recess in the thick door and I can grip my fingers on it and pull myself up, using my knees to help push me up higher. My right hand slips because it only has four fingers to hold on with, but I go again, clutching hard at the window space. And I see her. She wears a white shirt underneath what looks like a light blue painter’s smock. Her prison uniform makes her look so young, smaller and more fragile than I’ve ever seen her. She looks like a little girl who should be milking dairy cows in rolling Swiss hills. On the right wall of the cell is a desk and in the right rear corner are a chrome toilet and wash basin. There are two bunks bolted to the left wall of the cell and she sits on the edge of the lower bunk, her hands cupped together and being squeezed between her kneecaps. Her hair is everywhere, hanging over her face and over her ears. She wears the same blue rubber sandals Bernie was wearing. My arms can’t hold my weight and I slip off the door. I climb again, gripping harder to the recess in the door. A longer look inside this time. I see the truth of it all. The skeletal shinbones of her legs. The elbows like the balls of a hammer, arms like the sticks I’d use to spark the fire that would burn to the ground this long-life-lightbulb jailhouse home for mums on Christmas Day. Her cheekbones have moved higher on her face and her cheek flesh has disappeared, turned to a claypan of thin skin, and her face doesn’t look like it was grown by life but drawn, shaded by a humourless and macabre colourist in pencil that could be rubbed away by a drop of spit and a swiftly moving forefinger. But it’s not the legs or the arms or the cheekbones that trouble me; it’s the eyes, staring ahead at the wall opposite her. Blank staring. So lost in that wall it looks like her brain’s been removed. She looks like Jack Nicholson after the lobotomy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the setting fits. I can’t make out what she’s staring at on that wall but then I can. It’s me. It’s me and August, arm in arm. A photograph stuck to the cell wall. We have our shirts off, playing in the backyard of the Darra house, and August is forcing his belly right out with his right-hand fingers making alien gestures in his tiresome ‘ET phone home’ routine. I’m playing his extended belly like a bongo drum.

  I tap my knuckle gently on the glass panel. She doesn’t hear. I knock, hard and quick. She doesn’t hear me. I slip off the door and I jump back on again. ‘Mummmmmm,’ I whisper. I knock again, knock twice then three times, the last one too loud, too hard. I look right, up along the corridor. Laughter and applause still echo around the corner of B Block as the stars of When a Child Is Born to Hand Jive make their triumphant end-show bows. ‘Mummmm!’ I strain in a whisper. I knock louder. Two heavy bangs and she turns her head to me. Finds me looking frantically at her through the window. ‘Mum,’ I whisper. I smile. And she lights up for a flicker, a light switches on inside her and switches off just as fast. ‘Merry Christmas, Mum.’ And I’m crying now. Of course I’m crying now. I didn’t know how much I needed to cry for her until now, hanging by my fingers to the door of cell 24 in the Boggo Road women’s clink. ‘Merry Christmas, Mum.’

  I beam at her. See, Mum. See. After all this, after all these mad moments, after Lyle, after Slim, after you getting put away, it’s still the same old me. Nothing changes, Mum. Nothing changes me. Nothing changes you. I love you more, Mum. You think I love you less but I love you more because of it all. I love you. See. See that on my face.

  ‘Open the door, Mum,’ I whisper. ‘Open the door.’

  I slip off and I climb back up and a nail splits hard on my right hand middle finger and blood runs down the top of my hand. ‘Open the door, Mum.’ And I can’t hold on now and I wipe my eyes and the tears make my fingers slippery but I cling on again just long enough to see her staring blankly at me, shaking her head. No, Eli. I read that. I read it like I spent a decade reading my brother’s silent gestures. No, Eli. Not here. Not like this. No. ‘Open the door, Mum,’ I spill. ‘Open the door, Mum,’ I beg. She shakes her head. She’s crying now too. No, Eli. I’m sorry, Eli. No. No. No.

  My fingers slip off the door and I fall to the hard polished-concrete floor of the prison corridor. I struggle to find my breath in my tears and I lean back against the door. I bang my head twice, hard, against the door, which is harder than my head.

  And I breathe. I breathe deep. And I see the red telephone in Lyle’s secret room. And I see the sky-blue walls of Lena Orlik’s bedroom. I see the picture frame of Jesus who was born today. And I see Mum in that room. And I sing.

  Because she needs her song. I don’t have a record player to play her song, so I sing her song instead. The one she played so much. Side one, third thick line from the edge. That song about a girl who never said where she came from.

  And I turn and sing into the cracks in the door. I sing into the light of a crack one centimetre wide. I lay down on my belly and sing into the crack in the bottom of the door.

  Ruby Tuesday and her pain and her longing and her leaving and my cracking Christmas Day voice. I sing it. I sing it. Over and over. I sing it.

  And I stop. And there is silence. I bang my forehead against the door. And I don’t care any more. I’ll let her go. I’ll let them all go. Lyle. Slim. August. Dad. And my mum. And I’ll go find Caitlyn Spies and I’ll tell her I’m letting her go too. And I’ll be dumb. And I won’t dream. And I will crawl into a hole and read about dreamers like my dad does and I’ll read and read and drink and drink and smoke and smoke and die. Goodbye Ruby Tuesday. Goodbye Emerald Wednesday. Goodbye Sapphire Sunday. Goodbye.

  But the cell door opens. I can smell the cell immediately and it smells like sweat and damp and body odour. Mum’s rubber sandals squish on the floor by my side. She falls to the floor, crying. She puts a hand on my shoulder, weeping. She falls on me in the doorway of her cell.

  ‘Group hug,’ she says.

  I sit up and wrap my arms around her and I squeeze her so tight I worry I’m going to break one of the weak bones in her ribcage. I drop my head onto her shoulder and I didn’t know I missed that smell, that smell of Mum’s hair, that feeling of her.

 
; ‘Everything’s gonna be all right, Mum,’ I say. ‘Everything’s gonna be all right.’

  ‘I know, baby,’ she says. ‘I know.’

  ‘It gets good, Mum,’ I say.

  She hugs me tighter.

  ‘It all gets good after this,’ I say. ‘August told me, Mum. August told me. He says you just have to get through this little bit, just this little bit.’

  Mum weeps into my shoulder. ‘Ssssssshhhhhh,’ she says, patting my back. ‘Ssssssssshhhhhhhh.’

  ‘Just get through this bit and it all goes up from here. August knows it, Mum. This is the hardest bit, right here. It doesn’t get any worse.’

  Mum weeps harder. ‘Sssssssshhhhhh,’ Mum says. ‘Just hold me, sweetie. Just hold me.’

  ‘Do you believe me, Mum?’ I ask. ‘If you believe me then you’ll believe it will get better and if you believe it then it will.’

  Mum nods.

  ‘I’m gonna make it better, Mum, I promise,’ I say. ‘I’m gonna get us a place where you can go when you come out and it will be good and it will be safe and we can be happy and you can be free there, Mum. This is just time. And you can do what you want with time, Mum.’

  Mum nods.

  ‘Do you believe me, Mum?’

  Mum nods.

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘I believe you, Eli,’ she says.

  Then a female voice echoes down the corridor.

  ‘What thaaaaa faaaaarrrrk is this shit?’ barks a red-haired woman with a large belly and a backward lean, standing in her prison clothes, holding a plastic dessert bowl filled with wobbly red jelly, staring at Mum and me in the doorway of cell 24. She turns her head to the recreation area, hollering, ‘What sort of crèche you screws runnin’ here?’

  She slams her dessert on the ground, furious. ‘How the fuck does Princess Frankie deserve a contact today?’ she barks.

  Mum holds me tighter.

  ‘I gotta go, Mum,’ I say, pulling out of the embrace. ‘I gotta go, Mum.’

  She clings to me hard and I have to pull myself away from her. She drops her head, crying, as I stand up. ‘We’ll get through this little bit, Mum,’ I say. ‘It’s only time. You’re stronger than time, Mum. You’re stronger than it.’