Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  ‘You doin’ the cop work now?’ Dad asks. ‘You love this, don’t you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Having me over a barrel’, he says.

  ‘How exactly do I have you over a barrel?’

  ‘’Cause you can take those boys away from me with the tick of a box,’ Dad says.

  ‘It’s my job to ask difficult questions if those difficult questions ensure the safety of my students,’ Mrs Birkbeck says.

  ‘You think you’re serving your profession so nobly, so compassionately,’ Dad says. ‘You’ll take those boys from me and you’ll split ’em up and you’ll strip ’em bare of the only thing that keeps ’em going, each other, and you’ll tell your friends over a bottle of chardonnay from Margaret River how you saved two boys from their monster dad who nearly killed them once and they’ll bounce from foster home to foster home until they find each other again at the gate of your house with a can of petrol and they’ll thank you for sticking your nose into our business as they’re burning your house down.’

  Close your eyes. I close my eyes. And I see the dream. I see the memory. The car hits the lip of a dam edge – the backyard dam of someone’s farm in rural Samford, in the fertile hills of Brisbane’s western fringe – and we’re flying.

  ‘The boys were left unconscious,’ Mrs Birkbeck says.

  I can’t hear Dad respond.

  ‘It was a miracle anyone survived,’ she says. ‘The boys were unconscious but you pulled them out somehow?’

  The magic car. The flying sky-blue Holden Kingswood.

  Dad sighs. We can hear the sigh through the cracks.

  ‘We were going camping,’ Dad says. He leaves big gaps between his sentences. To think and drag on his smoke. ‘August loved camping under the stars. He loved looking up at the moon when he slept. Me and their mum had been going through some . . . issues.’

  ‘She ran away from you?’

  Silence.

  ‘Yeah, I guess you could say that.’

  Silence.

  ‘I guess I was thinking too much about it all,’ Dad says. ‘I should never have been drivin’. Got the big shakes just before a blind lip in Cedar Creek Road and that blind lip led to a blind corner. Wasn’t easy to see on the road. My brain turned to mush.’

  Long silence.

  ‘I got lucky,’ Dad says. ‘Them boys had their windows down. August always had his window down to look out at the moon.’

  August is still.

  And the moonlight shines on the black dam water in my mind. The full moon reflected in the dam. The dam pool. That damn moon pool.

  ‘Bloke who owned the little cottage near the dam came racing out,’ Dad says above us through the floorboards. ‘He helped me drag the boys out.’

  ‘They were unconscious?’

  ‘I thought I’d lost ’em.’ Dad’s voice wavers. ‘They were gone.’

  ‘They weren’t breathing?’

  ‘Well, that’s the tricky thing of it, Mrs Birkbeck,’ Dad says.

  August gives a half-smile. He’s enjoying this story. Nodding his head knowingly, as if he’s heard it before but I know he hasn’t. I know he can’t have heard it.

  ‘I woulda sworn they weren’t breathing,’ Dad says. ‘I tried resuscitating them, shook ’em like crazy to wake ’em up. And I couldn’t wake ’em. Then I start screaming to the sky like a lunatic and I look back down again at their faces and they’re awake.’

  Dad clicks his fingers.

  ‘Just like that,’ he says, ‘they come back.’

  He drags on his smoke. Exhales.

  ‘I asked the ambos about it when they lobbed up and they said the boys mighta been in shock. Said it mighta been hard for me to find a pulse or check their breathing because their bodies were so cold and numb.’

  ‘What do you think about that?’ Mrs Birkbeck asks.

  ‘I don’t think anything about that, Mrs Birkbeck,’ Dad says, frustrated. ‘It was a panic attack. I fucked up. And not an hour has passed in my life since that night that I haven’t wished I could turn that car back onto Cedar Creek Road.’

  A long pause.

  ‘I don’t think August has stopped thinking about that night,’ Mrs Birkbeck says.

  ‘How do you mean?’ Dad asks.

  ‘I think that night left a deep psychological imprint on August,’ Mrs Birkbeck says.

  ‘August has seen every psychologist in south-east Queensland, Mrs Birkbeck,’ Dad says. ‘He’s been analysed and tested and probed and prodded by people like you for years and none of ’em have ever said he was anything more than a normal kid who don’t like talkin’.’

  ‘He’s a bright boy, Robert. He’s bright enough not to tell those psychologists any of the things he tells his brother.’

  ‘Such as?’

  I look at August. He shakes his head. Eli. Eli. Eli. I look up at the floorboards, covered in messages and sketches August and I have scribbled under here in permanent marker. Bigfoot riding a skateboard. Mr T driving the DeLorean DMC-12 from Back to the Future. A poor sketch of Jane Seymour nude with breasts that look more like metal garbage can lids. A scribbled collection of dumb one-liners: I was wondering why the ball was getting bigger and bigger, and then it hit me. The banker wanted to check my balance so she pushed me over. I didn’t want to believe Dad was stealing from the road works, but all the signs were there.

  ‘Why did he stop talking?’ Mrs Birkbeck asks.

  ‘Not sure,’ Dad says. ‘He hasn’t told me yet.’

  ‘He told Eli he doesn’t talk because he’s afraid he’ll let his secret slip out,’ she says.

  ‘Secret?’ Dad spits.

  ‘Have the boys ever mentioned a red telephone to you?’ she asks.

  August boots my right shin. Fuckwit.

  A long pause.

  ‘No,’ Dad says.

  ‘Robert, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but August has been telling Eli a number of troubling things,’ Mrs Birkbeck says. ‘Traumatic things that are, I believe, themselves borne of trauma. Potentially harmful thoughts from a bright boy with an imagination too wild for his own good.’

  ‘All older brothers tell their younger brothers all kinds of bullshit,’ Dad says.

  ‘But Eli believes it all, Robert. Eli believes it because August believes it.’

  ‘Believes what?’ Dad asks, frustrated.

  Her voice turns to a whisper we can hear only faintly through the floorboard cracks.

  ‘It would appear August has become convinced that he . . . ummm . . . I don’t know how to say this . . . ummm . . . he believes he died that night in the moon pool,’ she says. ‘He believes he died and came back. And I think he believes he’s died before and come back before. And maybe he believes he’s died like that and come back like that several times.’

  A long pause in the kitchen. The sound of Dad lighting a smoke.

  ‘And it seems he told Eli that . . . well . . . he believes there are now other Augusts in other . . . places.’

  ‘Places?’ Dad echoes.

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Birkbeck says.

  ‘What sort of places?’

  ‘Well, places beyond our understanding. Places that are found at the other end of the red telephone the boys talk about.’

  ‘What fuckin’ . . . Sorry . . . what red telephone?’ Dad barks, losing patience.

  ‘The boys say they hear voices. A man at the end of a red telephone.’

  ‘I have no fuckin’ idea what you’re on about.’

  Mrs Birkbeck speaks now like she’s disciplining a six-year-old. ‘The red telephone that sits in the secret room beneath the house their mother shared with her partner, Lyle, who has inexplicably disappeared off the face of the earth.’

  Dad takes a long drag. A long silence.

  ‘August hasn’t spoken since that night of the moon pool because he doesn’t want to risk letting slip the truth behind his great secret,’ Mrs Birkbeck says. ‘And Eli is adamant the magic red phone is true because he’s spoken to a man on the
other end of the phone who knows things about him he couldn’t possibly know.’

  Another long pause. And Dad laughs. He howls, in fact.

  ‘Oh, that’s fuckin’ priceless,’ he says. ‘That’s fuckin’ spectacular.’

  I hear him slapping his knees.

  ‘I’m glad you can see the funny side,’ Mrs Birkbeck says.

  ‘And you believe that my boys truly believe all of this?’ Dad asks.

  ‘I believe both of their minds, quite some time ago perhaps, developed a complex and mixed belief system of real and imagined explanations for compounding moments of great trauma,’ she says. ‘I believe they are either deeply psychologically damaged or . . . or . . .’

  She pauses.

  ‘Or what?’ Dad asks.

  ‘Or . . . it couldn’t hurt to consider the other explanation for it all,’ she says.

  ‘What’s that?’ Dad asks.

  ‘That they are more special than you and I could possibly understand,’ Mrs Birkbeck says. ‘Maybe they do hear things that are beyond their own understanding as well and this red phone they’re talking about is the only way they know how to make sense of the impossible.’

  ‘That’s fuckin’ ridiculous,’ Dad says.

  ‘Maybe so,’ Mrs Birkbeck says. ‘Whatever the case – however fantastical these theories are – my point is that I truly fear these beliefs, even if they were formed in the imagination, might one day cause great harm to August and Eli. What if August’s belief in what he calls “coming back” transfers itself to some mistaken sense of . . . invincibility.’

  Dad chuckles.

  ‘I worry these thoughts have placed your boys on a path of recklessness, Robert.’

  Dad dwells on this for a moment. The flint of his lighter striking. An exhalation of smoke.

  ‘Well, you don’t need to worry yourself about my boys, Mrs Birkbeck,’ Dad says.

  ‘I don’t?’

  ‘Nah,’ Dad says. ‘Because that’s all a pile of horseshit.’

  ‘How so?’ asks Mrs Birkbeck.

  ‘I mean August is nuts and bolts,’ Dad says.

  ‘Sorry, nuts and bolts?’

  ‘He’s straight up and down,’ Dad says. ‘I mean it sounds like Eli’s taking the piss. He’s spinnin’ you a fantastical bullshit yarn to pull himself outta some shit he got himself in. It’s a win-win. You believe it and you think he’s special. You don’t believe it and you think he’s fucked in the head but you still think he’s special. Look, he’s a storyteller. And I hate to tell you, Mrs Birkbeck, but Eli was born with the two qualities of any good storyteller – the ability to string a sentence together and the ability to bullshit.’

  I look at August. He nods his head in agreement. The legs of one of the kitchen chairs slides across the kitchen floorboards. Mrs Birkbeck sighs.

  August sits up and moves into a crawl position, crab-walking back out from beneath the house. At the back of the under-house area, where there’s enough room between the dirt ground and the house’s floorboards for August to stand, he stops at one of Dad’s abandoned washing machines. It’s a top loader. He opens the lid of the washing machine and looks inside, closes the lid again. He waves me over. Open the lid, Eli. Open the lid.

  I open the lid and inside the washing machine is a black garbage bag. Look inside the bag, Eli. Look inside the bag.

  I look inside the bag and inside it there are ten rectangular blocks of heroin wrapped in brown greaseproof paper and wrapped again in clear plastic. The blocks are the size of the bricks they make at the Darra brickworks.

  August says nothing. He closes the lid to the washing machine and marches up the side of the house, back up the ramp, and into the kitchen. Mrs Birkbeck turns in her chair and immediately sees the intensity on August’s face.

  ‘What is it, August?’ she asks.

  He licks his lips.

  ‘I’m not gonna kill myself,’ he says. He points at Dad. ‘And we love him very much, which is only half as much as he loves us.’

  Boy Masters Time

  Do your time before it does you. Before it does the roses on Khanh Bui’s prize-winning garden on Harrington Street. Before it peels the paint off Bi Van Tran’s yellow Volkswagen van, still parked like it always is on Stratheden Street.

  Time is the answer to everything, of course. The answer to our prayers and murders and losses and ups and downs and loves and deaths.

  Time for the brothers Bell to grow up and for Lyle’s stash of heroin to grow in value along the way. Time puts hairs on my chin and my underarms and takes its time putting hairs on my balls. Time puts August in his final year at school, with me not far behind him.

  Time makes Dad a half-decent cook. He makes us meals most nights he’s not drinking. Chops and frozen vegetables. Sausages and frozen vegetables. A good spaghetti bolognese. He roasts mutton that we eat for a week. Some mornings, while the rest of the world is sleeping, he’s waist-deep in the mangroves of Cabbage Tree Creek, in seaside Shorncliffe, catching us mud crabs with claws that bulge like Viv Richards’ biceps. Some afternoons he walks halfway down to the Foodstore supermarket to get the groceries and he comes back with nothing and we don’t ask why because we know he got the panics, because we know his nerves now, how they ruin him, how they eat him alive from the inside where his arteries and his veins carry all that memory and tension and thought and drama and death.

  Some days I join him on the bus because he asks me to watch over him as he travels. He needs me to be his shadow. He asks me to talk to him. He asks me to tell him stories because they calm his nerves. So I tell him all the stories Slim told me. All those yarns about all those crims from Boggo Road. I tell him about my old pen pal, Alex Bermudez, and how those men inside wait for only two things in life, death and Days of Our Lives. When the nerves get too much, he gives me the nod and I press the bell for the bus to stop and Dad takes his breath by a bus stop and I tell him everything is going to be all right and we wait for the next bus back home. Small steps in our Dunlops. He gets a little further each trip out of the house. Bracken Ridge to Chermside. Chermside to Kedron. Kedron to Bowen Hills.

  Time makes Dad cut down on his drinking. Mid-strength beer comes to Queensland and Dad stops flooding the toilet with piss. They’ll never measure these things but I know more cartons of mid-strength beer in Bracken Ridge mean less Bracken Ridge mums presenting before Dr Benson in the Barrett Street Medical Centre with split eye sockets.

  Time puts Dad in a job. He soups up on enough Serepax to get him outside the front door and onto a bus that takes him into a job interview at the G. James Glass and Aluminium factory on Kingsford Smith Drive, Hamilton, not far from the Brisbane CBD. For three weeks he works on a factory line cutting lengths of aluminium into various shapes and sizes, earning enough to buy a small bronze-coloured 1979 Toyota Corona for $1000 from his loose Bracken Ridge Tavern mate, Jim ‘Snapper’ Norton, on a payment basis of $100 every payday for ten weeks. He smiles when he opens his wallet on Friday afternoon and shows me three grey-blue money notes, the ones we never see, the ones with Douglas Mawson on them standing in a snow jumper, the Antarctic cold freezing the many hairs on his iceberg-sized balls. I’ve never seen Dad more proud and he’s so proud this night he actually laughs more than he cries on the piss. But in the fourth week of this wondrous paid work, his foreman berates him for something he didn’t do – someone plugged in the wrong numbers on a line of metal sheeting and $5000 worth of metal came up five centimetres short – and Dad can’t absorb the injustice so he calls the foreman ‘obtuse’ and the young foreman doesn’t know what that means so Dad tells him. ‘It means you’re a freckle-faced cunt,’ he says. And on his way home he stops into the Hamilton Hotel, off Kingsford Smith Drive, to toast what he might have made of that wondrous paid work with eight pots of full-strength XXXX. And pulling out of the Hamilton Hotel driveway he’s stopped by police who send him to a judge for drink-driving and the judge takes away his driver’s licence and sentences Dad to a further six weeks’ comm
unity service and August and I have very little to say when Dad informs us that his court-ordered community service will be carried out assisting the aged and ailing groundsman, Bob Chandler, at our very own Nashville State High School. I have even less to say when I look out my classroom window in Maths A class to find Dad beaming proudly up at me, standing beside the giant ELI! he’s mowed into the manicured grass lawn that fronts the Mathematics and Science block.

  Time makes the phone ring.

  ‘Yeah,’ Dad says. ‘Okay. Yeah, I understand. What’s the address? Okay. Yep. Yep. Bye.’ He puts the phone down. August and I are watching Family Ties and eating sandwiches with devon and tomato sauce.

  ‘Yer mum’s gettin’ out a month early,’ he says. And he opens the drawer beneath the telephone, pops two Serepax, and walks on down the hallway to his bedroom, sucking those nerve lollies down like Tic Tacs.

  *

  Time makes the soft red roses on Khanh Bui’s prize-winning garden turn hard, makes them grow into themselves like Dad did after that brief and colourful moment in the spring sun of the G. James Glass and Aluminium factory line.

  I walk past Khanh Bui’s house on the way to Arcadia Street in Darra. I remember what Khanh Bui’s front garden looked like when it won first prize in a neighbourhood garden competition as part of a Darra State School fete celebration five years ago. It was like a lolly shop of colour then, a mix of ornamental and native plants that Khanh Bui would hose every morning we walked to school, standing in his blue and white pyjamas. Some mornings his wrinkly old dick would be sticking unassumingly out of the fly in his pyjamas but Mr Bui would never notice because his garden was so damn enchanting. But it’s all gone dry and dead now, straw-coloured and bristly like the grass oval in Ducie Street Park.

  As I turn into Arcadia Street I stop on the spot.

  Two Vietnamese men are sitting in white plastic garden chairs at the top of Darren Dang’s driveway. They wear black sunglasses and they sit in the sun in Adidas nylon tracksuits with white sneakers. The tracksuits are navy blue with three yellow stripes running down each side of their jackets and pants. I approach the front driveway slowly. One of the men holds his hands up to me. I stop. Both men stand from their chairs and reach for something out of view behind Darren’s large and secure front fence.