Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  They are now holding large and sharp-looking machetes when they approach me.

  ‘Who are you?’ asks one of the men.

  ‘I’m Eli Bell,’ I say. ‘I’m an old friend of Darren’s from school.’

  ‘What’s in bag?’ the same man spits with a thick Vietnamese accent.

  I look up and down the street, look up into the living room windows of the two-storey houses surrounding us, hoping nobody nosy is sticking their nose into this smelly business down here.

  ‘Well, it’s kinda sensitive,’ I whisper.

  ‘What da fuc’ uuu doin’ here?’ asks the man, impatient, his default facial expression being a snarl.

  ‘I’ve got a business proposal for Darren,’ I say.

  ‘You mean Mr Dang?’ the man snaps.

  ‘Yes, Mr Dang,’ I clarify.

  My heart is racing. My fingers grip the straps of my black backpack.

  ‘Business proposal?’ the man asks.

  I look around again, take a step closer.

  ‘I have some . . . ummm . . . merchandise . . . I think he might be interested in,’ I say.

  ‘Merchandise?’ the man suggests. ‘You BTK?’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘You BTK we cut your fuckin’ tongue out,’ the man says, his wide eyes suggesting he might enjoy said cut.

  ‘No, I’m not BTK,’ I say.

  ‘You Mormon?’

  I laugh. ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘You Jehovah’s Witness?’ the man spits. ‘You trying to sell fucking hot water system again?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  I briefly ponder what kind of strange parallel universe Darra I’ve walked back into. BTK? Mister Darren Dang?

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ I say. ‘Look, I just came to say g’day to Darren . . .’

  The Vietnamese men move closer, their hands working over the wooden handles of their machetes.

  ‘Pass me your bag,’ he says.

  I step back. The man raises his machete.

  ‘Bag,’ he says.

  I pass over the bag. He hands it to his offsider who looks inside. He speaks in Vietnamese to the man who appears to be his superior.

  ‘Where you get this merchandise?’ the superior asks.

  ‘Darren’s Mum sold it to my mum’s boyfriend a long time ago,’ I say. ‘I’ve come to sell it back.’

  The man looks at me silently. I can’t see his eyes through his black sunglasses.

  He pulls a black two-way radio transceiver from his pocket.

  ‘What’s your name again?’ he asks.

  ‘Eli Bell,’ I say.

  He talks into the transceiver in Vietnamese. The only words I catch are ‘Eli Bell’.

  He puts the transceiver back into his pocket, beckons me closer.

  ‘Come,’ he says. ‘Arms up.’

  I raise my hands and the two Vietnamese men frisk my legs and arms and hips.

  ‘Gee, security’s really picked up around here,’ I say.

  The superior’s right hand fidgets around my balls. ‘Gentle,’ I say as I squirm.

  ‘Follow me,’ he says.

  We don’t go up into the house where Lyle once made his deals with the exotic ‘Back Off’ Bich Dang. We pass Darren’s large yellow brick house down the left side. It’s only now that I realise the house’s high wood fence is lined with barbed wire. This is less a backyard than a fortress. We walk to a granny flat behind the main house that is more like a council toilet block made of white painted concrete blocks, a good place for drug dealers, or Hitler, to strategise. The gate man knocks once on the peach-coloured door of the bunker and says a single word in Vietnamese.

  The door opens and the gate man leads me into a hallway lined with framed black and white photographs of Darren Dang’s family members back home: wedding photographs, family functions, one shot of a man crooning into a microphone, another shot of an old lady holding a giant prawn by a brown river.

  The hallway leads to a living room where a dozen or so Vietnamese men stand in navy blue nylon Adidas tracksuits with yellow stripes down the sides of their arms and legs. They all wear black sunglasses like the men on the gate. These men in blue tracksuits stand around one man who sits in a red nylon Adidas tracksuit with white stripes running down his arms and legs. He sits at a sprawling timber office desk, running his eyes over several documents on the table. He does not wear black sunglasses. He wears mirrored aviator sunglasses with gold frames.

  ‘Darren?’ I say.

  The man in the red tracksuit looks up and I see a scar running from the left edge of his mouth. He takes his sunglasses off and his eyes adjust to my face. Eyes squinting.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he asks.

  ‘Darren, it’s me,’ I say. ‘It’s Eli.’

  He puts his sunglasses down on the table, reaches into a drawer beneath the desk. He pulls out a flick-knife and the blade snaps into view as he rounds the desk and approaches me. He rubs the bottom of his nose, sniffs sharply two times. His eyeballs are pulsing like lightbulbs losing power. He stands before me and runs the blade along my right cheek.

  ‘Eli who?’ he whispers.

  ‘Eli Bell,’ I say. ‘From school. Fuck me, Darren. It’s me, mate. I used to live just down the road.’

  He puts the blade up to my eyeball.

  ‘Darren? Darren? It’s me.’

  Then he freezes. A smile explodes across his face.

  ‘Haaaaaaaaaaaaaa!’ he hollers. ‘You see your face, bitch!’ he screams. His friends in navy blue tracksuits howl at my expense. He adopts a thick Australian outback accent. ‘You hear this bitch?’ he says to his audience. ‘“It’s me, maaaate. It’s meeeeeeeeeeeee, Eeeeloiiii.”’

  He slaps his thighs then wraps his arms around me, blade still fixed inside his right fist. ‘Come here, Bell End!’ he laughs. ‘What the fuck’s up with you? You don’t call, you don’t write. I had big plans for us, Tink.’

  ‘It all went to shit,’ I say.

  Darren nods in agreement. ‘Yeah, a whole bunch of runny ol’ Eli Bell shit,’ he says. He grips my right hand, lifts it into view, runs his finger across the pale white nub of my missing finger.

  ‘You miss it?’ Darren asks.

  ‘Only when I’m writing,’ I say.

  ‘No, I mean, Darra, dumb arse, you miss Darra?’

  ‘I do,’ I say.

  Darren walks back to his desk.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’ he asks. ‘Got a fridge full of soft drink in the room there.’

  ‘You got any Pasito?’

  ‘Nah,’ Darren says. ‘Got Coke, Solo, Fanta and Creaming Soda.’

  ‘I’m good,’ I say.

  He leans back in his desk chair and shakes his head.

  ‘Eli Bell is back in town!’ he says. ‘It’s good to see you, Tink.’

  His smile goes flat. ‘That was fucked what happened to Lyle,’ he says.

  ‘Was it Bich?’ I ask.

  ‘Was it Bich, what?’ he replies.

  ‘Was it Bich who ratted on Lyle?’

  ‘You think it was Mum?’ he asks, perplexed.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ I say. ‘But was it?’

  ‘She considered Lyle a client, just like Tytus Broz,’ he says. ‘Aside from the fact rattin’ is bad business, she had no reason to rat about any side business she had goin’ on because she was just doing business, Tink. If Lyle was dumb enough to start tradin’ with her behind his boss’s back, that was his business, not hers. His cash had the same numbers printed on it as anybody else’s. Nah, man, you know exactly who ratted his arse out.’

  No. No, I really don’t know. Not exactly. Not at all.

  Darren looks at me, mouth open, dumbstruck.

  ‘You really are one sweet kid, Eli,’ Darren says. ‘Don’t you know the biggest rats are always closest to the cheese?’

  ‘Teddy?’ I say.

  ‘I’d tell you, Tink, but I don’t eat no cheese,’ he says. Darren’s friends nod.

&nbs
p; Piss-weak fucksack so-called friend Tadeusz ‘Teddy’ Kallas. The fuckin’ cheese eater.

  ‘Where is your mum?’ I ask.

  ‘She’s up in the house resting,’ he says. ‘She got the Big C about a year ago.’

  ‘Cancer?’

  ‘Nah, cataracts,’ he says. ‘Poor Bich can’t see no more.’

  The gate man drops my backpack on his desk. Darren looks inside.

  ‘You still importing for Tytus Broz?’ I ask.

  ‘Nah, that pussy has gone to Dustin Vang and BTK,’ he says. ‘That incident with your precious Lyle didn’t help relations between Mum and Tytus.’

  Darren sticks his knife in the bag, pulls it back out with its tip holding grains of Lyle’s high-grade heroin.

  ‘What’s BTK?’ I ask.

  Darren inspects the gear on his knife like a jeweller inspecting the clarity of diamonds.

  ‘Born To Kill,’ Darren says. ‘It’s the new world, Tink. Everybody’s gotta be gang-affiliated now. BTK. 5T. Canal Boys. The exporters back home have all these rules around shit now. Everything goes through abracadabra Cabramatta down south and all the heads in Cab were forced to split into sides when all the heads back in Saigon split into sides. That punk bitch Dustin Vang went BTK and my mum went 5T.’

  ‘What’s 5T?’

  Darren looks around at his friends. They smile. They all chant something in Vietnamese. He stands and unzips his red nylon Adidas jacket, pulls down a white singlet to reveal a tattoo on his chest, a large numeral ‘5’ with a ‘T’ in the shape of a dagger, stabbing into a throbbing black heart emblazoned with five Vietnamese words: Tình, Tiên, Tù, Tôi and Thu.

  The 5T gang chant in unison. ‘Love, Money, Prison, Sin, Revenge’.

  Darren nods. ‘Fuck yeah,’ he says approvingly.

  There’s a knock on the door of the bunker. A young Vietnamese boy, maybe nine years old, dressed in his own navy nylon Adidas tracksuit, enters the office area. He’s sweating. He hollers something at Darren in Vietnamese.

  ‘BTK?’ replies Darren.

  The boy nods. Darren nods his head at a senior gang member to his right, who nods in turn at three other members who rush out of the bunker.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask.

  ‘Fuckin’ BTK crew walking down Grant Street,’ Darren says. ‘They’re not supposed to be walkin’ on fuckin’ Grant Street.’

  Darren is frustrated, impatient. He looks down at my bag again.

  ‘How much?’ he asks.

  ‘Sorry?’ I say.

  ‘How much?’ he repeats. ‘What are you asking?’

  ‘For the gear?’ I clarify.

  ‘No, Tink, for you to blow my Charlie dick. Yes, how much you askin’ for the gear?’

  ‘That’s the gear your mum sold Lyle almost four years ago,’ I say.

  ‘You don’t say,’ he says, dry and sarcastic. ‘I thought you might have started up your own import business out at bumfuck Bracken Ridge.’

  I make my sales pitch. I rehearsed it six times in our bedroom yesterday, but there weren’t fourteen intimidating Vietnamese men in sunglasses staring at me in my bedroom.

  ‘I figure with the focus Queensland Police have put on the heroin trade of late that prices for gear of that integrity . . .’

  ‘Ha!’ laughs Darren. ‘Integrity? I like that, Tink, sounds like your sellin’ me an English butler or something. Integrity.’ The gang members laugh.

  I soldier on.

  ‘. . . gear of that quality, I figure, would be tough to come by and so I’m thinking, for the amount we have in that bag there, a fair price would be . . .’

  I look into Darren’s eyes. He’s done this before. I’ve never done this. Five hours ago I was drawing my stick portrait as a knight holding Excalibur in the heat mist on Dad’s bathroom shower door. Now I’m making a heroin deal with the sixteen-year-old leader of the 5T gang. ‘Ummmm . . .’ Damn it, don’t say ‘ummmm’. Confidence. ‘Er . . . $80,000?’

  Darren smiles. ‘I like your style, Eli,’ he says.

  He turns to another gang member. Talks in Vietnamese. The gang member rushes into another room.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ I ask.

  ‘He’s grabbing you your $50,000,’ Darren says.

  ‘Fifty thousand?’ I echo. ‘I said $80,000. What about inflation?’

  ‘Tink, the only inflation I can see right now is the hot air blowing up your arse.’ Darren smiles. ‘Yes, it’s probably worth at least $100,000, but as much as I love you, Eli, you are you and I am me and the problem with being you right now, aside from the fact you can’t bowl a cricket ball to save yourself, is the fact you would not have the faintest clue where to take that gear anywhere beyond that door behind you.’

  I turn around and look at the door behind me. Fair point well made.

  Darren laughs. ‘Aaaaah, I’ve missed you, Eli Bell,’ he says.

  Three gang members burst back into the office barking frantic words at Darren.

  ‘Fuckin’ gook cunts,’ Darren barks.

  He barks at his gang members in thick Vietnamese. The gang members all rush to an adjoining room and re-emerge just as fast carrying machetes. Another gang member emerges from a separate room holding my $50,000 in three brick-shaped blocks of $50 notes. The men with machetes file down the hallway with military diligence, clanging their machetes excitedly against the hallway walls as they exit the bunker.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ I ask.

  ‘Fuckin’ BTK have broken the peace agreement,’ Darren says, opening a long drawer in his desk. ‘They’re about two minutes from my fuckin’ house. I’m gonna cut their fuckin’ BTK heads off like the catfish cunts they are.’

  He brings out a gleaming gold-coloured custom-made machete emblazoned with the 5T logo.

  ‘What about me?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ he says.

  He leans back down to his drawer and pulls out another machete, tosses it to me.

  I fumble for the handle and the blade nearly lodges into my foot on its way to the ground. I quickly pick up the weapon.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I mean, we need to finish the deal.’

  ‘Tink, the deal’s fuckin’ done,’ he says.

  His helper hands me my backpack. The drugs have disappeared from the bag and been replaced with blocks of cash.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Darren says.

  Darren rushes down the hallway, a warrior’s bloodlust across his face.

  ‘I think I’ll just wait in here till you guys are all done,’ I say.

  ‘’Fraid not, Tink,’ he says. ‘We got enough money in this bunker to feed Big Rooster to the people of Vietnam for six months. We gotta lock this joint up.’

  ‘I’ll just slip out over the back fence,’ I say.

  ‘We got barbed wire walls on all sides. Ain’t no way outta here but through that front gate,’ he says. ‘What’s wrong with you anyway? These BTK fuckers wanna take over our crib. They want all the Darra territories. You gonna let these fuckers take over our hometown? This is our turf, Tink. We gotta defend it.’

  *

  The battle starts much like any other throughout history. The heads of each opposing clan exchange words.

  ‘I’m gonna cut your nose off, Tran, and stick a key ring through your nostril,’ Darren calls from the front of his house on the cul-de-sac of Arcadia Street, standing in the centre of a group of 5T members that has now swelled to about thirty.

  At the entrance to the street stands the man who I guess is named Tran, before his gang of fidgety BTK barbarians who do indeed appear to have been placed on this earth for the sole purpose of ending the lives of others. Tran holds a machete in his right hand and a hammer in his left, leading a group that outnumbers Darren’s by at least ten.

  ‘I’m gonna cut your ears off, Darren, and sing the Marching Song into them every night before supper,’ Tran says.

  Then the clanging starts. Gang members on both sides clanging the metal weapon of the man next to them. A rhythmic clanging th
at escalates in intensity. A call to war. A song of doom.

  And something inside me, my own lust for life, my own quest for peace perhaps, or maybe just my innate fear of having a machete lodged into my scalp, makes me push through the huddle of 5T members from my position behind them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry.’ I walk into the centre of Arcadia Street, the very centre of the divide between these two bloodthirsty groups. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt,’ I call. And the clanging of machetes halts. Silence fills the street and my shaky voice echoes across Darra.

  ‘I know there’s no reason why you should listen to me,’ I call. ‘I’m just some idiot who dropped in to see his mate. But I really feel an outsider’s perspective might help you guys resolve any grievances you may have against each other.’

  I turn to each side. A look of profound befuddlement can be seen on the faces of Darren and Tran.

  ‘Sons of Darra,’ I say. ‘Sons of Vietnam. Was it not war that forced your families from their homelands? Was it not hate and division and miscommunication that brought you to this beautiful suburb in the first place? There’s a strange land out past the borders of Darra and that place is called Australia. And that place isn’t always nice to newcomers. That place isn’t always welcoming to outsiders. You guys will face enough fights out there, out there beyond this sanctuary of home. You need to fight together out there, not against each other in here.’

  I point to my own head.

  ‘Maybe it’s time we all started using a bit more of this,’ I say.

  And I raise my machete.

  ‘And a bit less of this.’

  I slowly and symbolically place my machete flat on the bitumen of a motionless Arcadia Street. Darren looks at his men. Tran lowers his arms for a moment and looks across at his soldiers. Then he looks back at me. Then he raises his weapons once more.

  ‘Tan coooooong!’ he screams. And the BTK army charges forth, machetes and hammers and crowbars raised to the Brisbane sky.

  ‘Kill ’em all!’ screams Darren, as the merciless 5T army sprints forward, rubber shoes rushing on the street and metal clanging in anticipation. I turn and sprint to the side of the street just as the two rabid armies meet in an explosion of flesh on flesh and blade on blade. I leap over a knee-high fence and into the front garden of a small cottage home, four doors up from Darren’s house. I fall to my belly and crawl across the cottage home’s front lawn, praying a BTK member hasn’t spotted my escape. I crawl to the side of the house and find shelter behind a white rosebush from where I take one last look at the Great Machete Battle of Arcadia Street. Blades whistling through air, fists and elbows finding foreheads and noses. Legs kicking into stomachs. Knees meeting eyeballs. Darren Dang leaps briefly and triumphantly out of the melee on an arcing flight towards some unsuspecting rival warrior. My hand reaches to the bottom of my backpack to feel for the fifty grand still sitting in there. And I thank the gods of war for remembering the sixth ‘T’. Turn and run.