Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  ‘I’m here for the awards,’ I say.

  ‘Your name, sir?’

  ‘Eli Bell.’

  She scans a wad of papers with printed names. I have the black tote bag over my left shoulder. I slip it off my shoulder, down behind the desk, out of her view.

  ‘Have they announced the community awards yet?’

  ‘I believe they’re announcing them now,’ she says.

  She finds my name, ticks it with her pen. She tears a ticket from a pad, hands it to me.

  ‘You’re in row M, sir,’ she says. ‘Seat seven.’

  I scurry to the doors of the auditorium. A vast and round room built for fine music. Maybe five hundred red chairs and important people in black suits and nice dresses, divided into two main groups split by a central aisle. Polished wood floors running to a polished wood stage with five levels of choir staging before a backdrop of imposing brass and silver acoustic pipes.

  The MC tonight is the woman who reads the news for Channel Seven, Samantha Bruce. She comes on every afternoon, straight after Wheel of Fortune. Dad calls Samantha Bruce a ‘quinella’. A double win. Easy on the eye but bright too. He recently confessed this adoration for the newsreader when I asked him if he would ever entertain marrying another woman and he came back with his quinella theory and how his dream date would be a night with Samantha Bruce in Kookas restaurant at the Bracken Ridge Tavern, during which Samantha Bruce would stare longingly across the table at him, whispering the same word over and over: ‘Perestroika’. I then asked Dad what the womanly equivalent of a trifecta would be.

  ‘Shuang Chen,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s Shuang Chen?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s a Shanghai dental nurse I read about.’

  ‘What makes her the trifecta?’

  ‘She was born with three tits.’

  Samantha Bruce leans into a lectern microphone.

  ‘Now we move to our Community Champions,’ the newsreader MC says. ‘These are the unsung Queensland heroes who are always putting themselves last. Well, ladies and gentlemen, tonight we put them first and foremost in our collective heart.’

  The packed house applauds. I walk through the central aisle, looking at row numbers on the edge of seats. Row W for why. Row T for the time has come for Tytus Broz. Row M for my mum and my dad. Sitting together seven seats along row M. My parents. Two spare chairs beside them. Mum sparkles in a black dress that shimmers in some form of light that shines down on her and I look up to find where that light comes from and it’s the ceiling of the auditorium. The whole ceiling is a domed silver-white moon that takes on the colours of the greens and reds and purples that flash on stage. The full moon inside this theatre.

  Dad wears a grey vinyl jacket that he obviously bought for $1.50 at the Sandgate St Vinnies. Aquamarine slacks. The fashion sense of a twenty-year agoraphobe who never sees enough humans to follow fashion. But he made it here and the fact he made it here and is still sitting here makes me all wet-eyed. Cheesy fuck I am. Even after everything. All that warped madness beneath the earth. The blinky tears again.

  An usher taps me on the shoulder.

  ‘Are you lost?’ the usher asks.

  ‘No, I’m not lost,’ I say.

  Mum spots me out of the corner of her eye. She smiles and hurries me to her with a wave.

  The newsreader starts reading names into the lectern microphone.

  ‘Magdalena Godfrey, Coopers Plains,’ she says.

  Magdalena Godfrey proudly walks on stage from its left wing. She beams as she receives a gold medal on a Queensland maroon ribbon and a certificate from a man on stage in a suit. The man in the suit puts his arm around Magdalena and ushers her towards a photographer front-of-stage who snaps three quick shots of Magdalena giving a goofy smile over her certificate. On the third shot, Magdalena bites into her gold medal for laughs.

  ‘Sourav Goldy, Stretton,’ Samantha Bruce says.

  Sourav Goldy takes the stage and bows, takes a certificate and his gold medal.

  I squeeze past six people pulling their knees back courteously in their seats. My black tote bag bumps their heads and their shoulders as I pass.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Mum whispers.

  ‘I was working on a story.’

  ‘What the hell do you have in that bag?’

  Dad leans over.

  ‘Ssssshhhh,’ he says. ‘Gus is up.’

  ‘August Bell, Bracken Ridge.’

  August pads onto the stage. His black jacket doesn’t fit him well, his tie’s too loose and his cream-coloured chinos are ten centimetres too long and his hair is scruffy, but he’s happy and so is my mum, who drops the evening’s booklet program on the ground in a hurry so she has two free hands to clap her brilliant selfless weirdo mute son.

  Dad puts a forefinger and thumb in his mouth, blowing a sharp and inappropriate whistle like he’s calling an outback cattle dog home at sunset.

  Prompted by Mum’s applause, a vigorous clapping spreads through the auditorium and this makes my mum so proud she has to stand to keep from exploding.

  August shakes hands with the man in the suit, gratefully accepts his medal and certificate. He smiles proudly for his photograph; he waves into the crowd and Mum waves back desperately, despite the fact August’s wave was more general, in a queen’s drive-by kind of way. Mum’s going through the six stages of motherly loving: pride, elation, regret, gratitude, hope and pride again. Each of these stages is navigated through tears. August then walks off the right side of the stage.

  I stand and begin squeezing past the knees of the people sitting beside me to my right.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Excuse me. My apologies. Sorry about this.’

  ‘Eli,’ Mum whisper-screams. ‘Where are you going?’

  I turn and offer a wave that I hope conveys my hope to be back at my seat in a brief moment. I rush up the central aisle to the back of the auditorium and make for a side door that opens to a walkway where backstage staffers in black shirts and black pants are buzzing about with coffee urns and teacups and silver platters of scones and biscuits. I run forward a few steps, then go back to a walk when an official- and important-looking woman gives me a quizzical eye. I smile casually like I’m meant to be there. Confidence, Slim. Moving in magic. She doesn’t know a thing because I move in magic. I turn through a door that looks like it’s heading to the toilets and the official-looking woman with the evil eye continues up the side-of-hall walkway. I go back out the doorway I just came through and slip casually and efficiently behind a black curtain at the side of the stage.

  August. He walks towards me. A big curling smile on his face with his gold medal bouncing on his chest as he springs along the polished wooden floors of the stage wing. But his smile fades when he sees my smile fade.

  ‘What is it, Eli?’

  ‘I found him, Gus.’

  ‘Who?’

  I open the black tote bag and August looks inside. He stares down into the bag. August says nothing.

  He nods his head to the side. Follow me.

  He hurries to the door of a green room running off the side-of-stage area, opens it swiftly. A carpeted room. Tables and chairs. Hard black instrument cases. Speaker equipment. A fruit platter of orange and rockmelon skins, watermelon pieces half eaten. August shuffles to a chrome tool tray on wheels. On the tray sits a box covered in a red silk cloth. A name card sits beside it. Tytus Broz. August lifts one corner of the silk cloth to reveal Tytus Broz’s glass box holding his prototype-silicone-arm life’s work. His big reveal. His great gift to the State of Queensland.

  August doesn’t say something. What he doesn’t say is, Pass me the bag, Eli.

  *

  We slip back out the side of the black curtain into the hall’s side thoroughfare. Moving quickly now. The brothers Bell. The survivors, Eli and August, the Queensland Champion. The gold medallist and his younger brother who worships him. Walking hard. Then the official who gave me the evil eye before gives me that same evi
l eye again as she passes back down the walkway and time slows in this moment because that woman is ushering a man to the backstage area. An old man dressed in white. White suit. White hair. White shoes. White bones. The old man catches sight of my face late and my face registers in his mind only after I’ve passed by his shoulder. Time and perspective. Time doesn’t exist and from any perspective this scene would always see Tytus Broz stop and scratch his head as he wonders about the young man he passed carrying the black tote bag just like the one he keeps in his bunker of very bad things. But from any perspective he would be puzzled because when time resumed at normal speed we would always be gone. Escaped. Gone to see our mum and dad.

  *

  ‘And at last we come to our final award for the evening, ladies and gentlemen,’ says the newsreader MC. ‘One single award winner truly deserving of our inaugural Queensland Senior Champion Award.’

  I’m squeezing past the knees of the long-suffering six people sitting next to us in Row M. August waits in the central aisle.

  I’m gesturing to Mum that we need to go. Throwing thumbs over my shoulder, pointing at August. I reach my seat.

  ‘We need to go, guys,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t be so rude, Eli,’ Mum says. ‘We’ll stay for the last award.’

  I put a hand on Mum’s shoulder. Serious face. Never more serious face.

  ‘Please, Mum,’ I say. ‘You don’t want to see this one.’

  And the Channel Seven newsreader joyfully calls the inaugural Queensland Senior Champion to the stage.

  ‘Tytus Broz,’ she sings.

  Mum’s eyes turn from me to the stage and it takes a moment to connect the name with the figure in the white suit moving slowly onto the stage to accept his award.

  She stands. She says nothing. She moves.

  *

  ‘What’s the bloody rush?’ Dad asks as we reach the grand entry doors of Brisbane City Hall.

  But his train of thought is derailed by the flashing lights of two police cars on the paved King George Square, the cars parked in a V-shape blocking in Caitlyn’s Ford Meteor.

  Maybe ten sky-blue-uniformed police officers walking towards us. Two more police officers carefully assisting Bevan Penn to the back of a police car. Bevan’s gaze finds me in the chaos. He nods. Appreciation in that nod. Confusion. Survival. Silence.

  ‘What the fuck’s goin’ on ’ere?’ Dad ponders aloud.

  Caitlyn Spies walks among the police officers. She leads them, in fact. Spies digs deep. She enters the hall foyer and points through the doors of the auditorium.

  ‘He’s already up there,’ she says. ‘That’s him in the white.’

  The police officers file into the auditorium.

  ‘What’s going on, Eli?’ Mum asks.

  Our eyes follow the police officers as they assume positions throughout the auditorium waiting for Tytus Broz to finish a long and self-inflating speech about the past four decades he has dedicated to Queensland’s disabled community.

  ‘It’s the end of Tytus Broz, Mum,’ I say.

  Caitlyn walks over to me.

  ‘You okay?’ she asks.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yeah, they’ve sent three police cars to the Bellbowrie house.’

  Caitlyn turns her eyes to Mum and Dad; they’re watching this scene like it was a moon landing.

  ‘Hi,’ Caitlyn says.

  ‘This is my mum, Frances,’ I say. ‘My dad, Robert. My brother, Gus.’

  ‘I’m Caitlyn,’ she says.

  Mum shakes Caitlyn’s hand. Dad and Gus smile.

  ‘So you’re the one he’s always talking about?’ Mum says.

  ‘Mum,’ I say, short and sharp.

  Mum’s looking at Caitlyn, smiling.

  ‘Eli says you’re a very special woman,’ she says.

  I roll my eyes.

  ‘Well,’ Caitlyn replies, ‘I think I’m only just starting to realise how special your boys are, Mrs Bell.’

  Mrs Bell. I don’t hear that much. Mum likes it as much as I do.

  Caitlyn turns her eyes to the auditorium. Tytus Broz is still talking on stage. He’s talking about selflessness and making the most of the time we have on earth. We can’t see his face from here because there are too many people gathered in the foyer before the auditorium doors.

  ‘Keep pushing,’ Tytus says. ‘Never give up. Whatever you want to achieve. Keep going. Never waste a single opportunity to transform your wildest dreams into your favourite memories.’

  He coughs. Clears his throat.

  ‘I have a surprise for you all tonight,’ Tytus Broz announces grandly. ‘The sum of my life’s work. A vision for the future. A future where young Australians who are not blessed with all the gifts of our glorious God are, instead, blessed by the gift of human ingenuity.’

  He pauses.

  ‘Samantha, if you will be so kind.’

  Perspective, Slim. Infinite angles on a single moment. Maybe there are five hundred people in this auditorium and each person views this moment from their own individual perspective. I view it in my mind because my eyes can only see Caitlyn. We can’t see the stage from where we stand but we can hear the sound of the audience as it reacts to Samantha Bruce removing the red silk cloth on Tytus’s glass display box holding his life’s work. We can hear the horrified gasps of the audience that ripple from Row A all the way to Row Z. People howling. A woman wailing. Men screaming in shock and outrage.

  ‘What’s happening, Eli?’ Mum asks.

  I turn to her.

  ‘I found him, Mum.’

  ‘Found who?’

  I can see the police officers rushing down the central aisle now. Other officers close in around Tytus Broz from the east and west sides of the auditorium. August and I share a glance at each other. Your end is a dead blue wren. Your end is a dead blue wren.

  I see it all unfolding in my mind’s eye from the perspective of the people still sitting in Row M.

  Captain Ahab is drowning in a sea of Queensland Police. The sky-blue cops dragging Tytus Broz away, taking his old and frail arms by the sleeves of his white suit. Placing those arms around his back. Audience members shielding their eyes with their cupped hands; women in cocktail dresses gagging and screaming. Tytus Broz dragged from the stage as he looks, looks, looks in befuddlement at the glass box on stage, wondering how in the world and in this puzzling universe his life’s-work silicone super limb was replaced with the warped and macabre and plastinated severed head of the first man I ever loved.

  *

  Time, Slim. Do your time before it does you. It slows now. Everybody moves in slow motion and I’m not sure if I’m making them do it. The police lights, flashing red and blue and silent. That slow and deliberate nod of August’s that says he’s proud of me. That says he knew it was going to happen exactly like this. That it was going to all unfold in this busy City Hall foyer, with people rushing to leave the building, clutching their purses and umbrellas and tripping over their long evening dresses. Important men barking their dismay and trauma at event organisers. The woman with the evil eye in tears, overwhelmed by the pandemonium caused by that severed head on stage. August’s knowing smile and his right forefinger pen writing me a message in the air.

  August walks away, shuffles elegantly and calmly towards Mum and Dad, standing to the side of the hall’s entry doors. They’re giving me some space. They’re giving me some time. Time with the girl of my dreams. She stands before me, a metre from me, police and audience members and officials zipping back and forth around the bubble of us.

  ‘What just happened?’ Caitlyn asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I shrug. ‘It all happened too fast.’

  Caitlyn shakes her head.

  ‘Were you really talking to someone on that telephone?’ she asks.

  I think about this for a long moment.

  ‘I don’t know any more. Do you think I was?’

  She stares into my eyes.

  ‘I need to think on tha
t some more,’ she says. She nods to a huddle of police officers.

  ‘Cops want us down at Roma Street police station,’ she says. ‘You wanna come with me?’

  ‘Mum and Dad are gonna drive me down,’ I say.

  She looks out from the foyer to Mum, Dad and August, now waiting at the edge of King George Square.

  ‘I thought they’d look different, your mum and dad,’ she says.

  I laugh. ‘You did?’

  ‘They’re so nice,’ she says. ‘They just look like any normal mum and dad.’

  ‘They’ve been working on normal for quite some time now.’

  Caitlyn nods. Hands in her pockets. She bounces on her heels. I want to say something else to stay in this moment, freeze it, but I can only slow time, I can’t stop it yet.

  ‘Brian’s gonna want me to write all this up tomorrow,’ Caitlyn says. ‘What do you think I should say to him?’

  ‘You should say you’ll write it, every last bit of it,’ I say. ‘The truth. All of it.’

  ‘No fear,’ she says.

  ‘No favour,’ I say.

  ‘You want to write it with me?’ she asks.

  ‘But I’m not a crime writer.’

  ‘Not yet,’ she says. ‘Joint byline?’

  Joint byline with Caitlyn Spies. Dream stuff. A story in three words.

  ‘Caitlyn and Eli,’ I say.

  She smiles.

  ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Caitlyn and Eli.’

  Caitlyn shuffles back towards the huddle of police. I walk to the entry doors of the auditorium. The space is almost empty of people. A police forensics officer is on stage carefully inspecting Tytus Broz’s glass box, now with the red silk cloth covering it. I look up to the moon-shaped white ceiling, like four white beach shells, four quarters of a circle coming together to form a whole moon. I see the beginning in that ceiling and I see the end. I see my brother, August, sitting on the fence in front of the Darra house, the full sun behind him, writing those air words that have followed me through my short life: Your end is a dead blue wren.

  *

  I turn away from the auditorium and walk towards the front hall exit but a figure stands before me. Tall and lean and old and strong. I see the figure’s shoes first, black leather dress shoes, unpolished and worn. Black dress slacks. A blue button-up shirt with no tie and an old wrinkled black jacket. I see the face of Iwan Krol and it’s the face of death. But my spine knows him first and so do the teenage bones in my calves and they help me move. I spring sharply away but not sharp enough to miss the blade hidden in his right fist that stabs into the right side of my belly. It feels like a tear. Like someone tore open my belly and stuck a finger inside, wiggled it around like it was searching for something I shouldn’t have swallowed. Something I swallowed long ago, like the universe. I stagger groggily backwards, staring at Iwan Krol as though I still can’t believe he would do such a thing. That he could be so cold, despite everything I know about him, despite everything I’ve seen. That he could stab a young man on a night like this, this electric night when Caitlyn and Eli saw the future and they saw the past and they smiled at them both. I’m dizzy and my mouth is suddenly dry and it takes me a moment to realise Iwan Krol is coming towards me for a second blow, a final blow. I can’t even see the blade he stabbed me with. He’s hiding it somewhere. In his sleeve, maybe. In his pockets. Run, Eli. Run. But I can’t run. The wound in my belly makes me keel over in agony. I try to scream but I can’t because screaming uses the muscles in my gut and my gut muscles have been stabbed deep. All I do is stagger. Stagger left. Stagger away from Iwan Krol. And I pray to be seen by police gathering beyond the hall doors but they have not seen me in the movement of the audience members gathered in the foyer, discussing the horror of the severed head while missing the horror of the boy and the blade-wielding beast unfolding among them. Iwan Krol got me with a perfect prison yard stabbing, an accomplished porridge shiv. Quick and quiet. No big scenes.