Trent Dalton - Boy Swallows Universe

These were Mum’s Debbie Harry ‘Heart of Glass’ years. People say junk makes you look horrific, that too much heroin tears your hair out, leaves scabs all over your face and your wrists from your anxious fingers and your anxious fingernails that keep filling with blood and rolled skin. People say the gear sucks the calcium out of your teeth and your bones, leaves you couch-bound like a rotting corpse. And I’d seen all that. But I also thought junk made Mum look beautiful. She was thin and pale white and blonde, not as blonde as Debbie Harry but just as pretty. I thought junk made Mum look like an angel. She had this fixed dazed look on her face, there but not there, like Harry in that ‘Heart of Glass’ clip, like something from a dream, moving in the space between sleeping and waking, between life and death, but sparkling somehow, like she had a mirror ball permanently spinning in the pupils of her sapphire eyes. And I remember thinking that’s how an angel really would look if they found themselves in suburban Darra, south-east Queensland, down all this way from heaven. Such an angel really would be dazed like that, puzzled, glassy, flapping her wings as she studied all those dishes piling up in the sink, all those cars passing by the house beyond the cracks in the curtains.

There’s a golden orb-weaver spider that builds a web outside my bedroom window so intricate and perfect that it looks like a single snowflake magnified a thousand times. The orb-weaver spider sits in the middle of the web like it’s parachuting sideways, suspended in the quest it keeps wanting to finish without needing to know the reason why, blown but not beaten by wind and rain and afternoon summer storms so strong they fell power poles. Mum was the orb-weaver spider in those years. And she was the web, and she was the butterfly too, the blue tiger butterfly with sapphire wings being eaten alive by the spider.

‘We need to get outta here, Gus.’

August hands me the flashlight to hold. He turns around and kneels down, sliding his legs backwards through the space in the wardrobe and into the void of the room. He drops into the room and his feet find footing. He turns back around to me and, standing on his toes for extra height, he nods at the sliding wardrobe door. I close it behind us and we’re in total darkness but for the light from the torch. August nods me into the void, reaches up to take the flashlight from my hands. I shake my head.

‘This is insane.’

He nods me in again.

‘You’re an arsehole.’

He smiles. August knows I’m just like him. August knows that if someone told me there was a hungry Bengal tiger on the loose behind a door I’d open it to be sure they weren’t lying. I slip down into the room and my bare feet land on the cold damp earth of the room’s floor. I run a hand along the walls, rough brick and dirt.

‘What is this place?’

August stands staring at the red telephone.

‘What are you looking at?’

He keeps staring at the telephone, excited and distant.

‘Gus, Gus …’

He raises his left forefinger. Wait a second.

And the telephone rings. A rapid ring that fills the room. Ring, ring. Ring, ring.

August turns to me, his eyes wide and electric blue.

‘Don’t answer it, Gus.’

He lets it ring three more times and then his hand reaches for the receiver.

‘Gus, don’t pick up that fucking phone!’

He picks it up. Phone to his ear. He’s already smiling, seemingly amused by someone on the other end of the line.

‘Can you hear something?’

August smiles.

‘What is it? Gimme a listen.’

I grab for the phone but August pushes my arm away, his left ear squeezing the phone to his left shoulder. He’s laughing now.

‘Is someone talking to you?’

He nods.

‘You need to put the phone down, Gus.’

He turns away from me, listening intently, the phone’s twisting red cord wrapping over his shoulder. He stands with his back turned to me for a full minute, then he turns back around with a vacant look across his face. He points to me. They want to speak to you, Eli .

‘No.’

He nods his head and passes the phone to me.

‘I don’t want it now,’ I say, pushing the phone away.

August snarls, eyebrows raised. Don’t be such a child, Eli. Then he throws the phone at me and, instinctively, I catch it. Deep breath.

‘Hello?’

The voice of a man.

‘Hello.’

A real man type man, deep voice. A man in his fifties maybe, sixties even.

‘Who is this?’ I ask.

‘Who do you think this is?’ the man replies.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Of course you do.’

‘No, I really don’t.’

‘Yes, you do. You have always known.’

August smiles, nodding his head. I think I know who it is.

‘You’re Tytus Broz?’

‘No, I am not Tytus Broz.’

‘You’re a friend of Lyle’s?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re the man who gave Lyle the Golden Triangle heroin I found in the mower catcher?’

‘How do you know it was Golden Triangle heroin?’

‘My friend Slim reads The Courier-Mail every day. When he’s finished with the paper he passes it to me. The crime desk has been writing stories about heroin spreading through Brisbane from Darra. They say it comes from the main opium-producing area of South-East Asia that overlaps Burma, Laos and Thailand. That’s the Golden Triangle.’

‘You know your stuff, kid. You read a lot?’

‘I read everything. Slim says reading is the greatest escape there is and he’s made some great escapes.’

‘Slim’s a very wise man.’

‘You know Slim?’

‘Everybody knows the Houdini of Boggo Road.’

‘He’s my best friend.’

‘You’re best friends with a convicted killer?’

‘Lyle says Slim didn’t kill that cab driver.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Yes, that’s right. He says Slim was verballed. They stitched him up for it because he had history. They do that, you know, the cops.’

‘Has Slim told you himself that he didn’t do it?’

‘Not really, but Lyle says there’s no way in hell he did it.’

‘And you believe Lyle?’

‘Lyle doesn’t lie.’

‘Everybody lies, kid.’

‘Not Lyle. He’s physically incapable of it. That’s what he told Mum, anyway.’

‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’

‘He called it a full-blown medical condition, “Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder”. It means he can’t mask the truth. He can’t lie.’

‘I don’t think that means he can’t lie. I think it means he can’t be discreet.’

‘Same thing.’

‘Maybe, kid.’

‘I’m sick of adults being discreet. Nobody ever gives you the full story.’

‘Eli?’

‘How do you know my name? Who are you?’

‘Eli?’

‘Yes.’

‘You sure you want the full story?’

There’s the sound of the wardrobe door sliding open. Then August sucks in a deep mouthful of air and I feel Lyle looking through the wardrobe space well before I hear him.

‘What the fuck are you two doing in there?’ he barks.

August drops to the ground and in the dark I can only see flashes of his torchlight frantically making lightning bolt shapes on the walls of this small dank underground earth room as his hands feel desperately for something and he finds it.

‘Don’t you fucking dare,’ Lyle hollers through clenched teeth.

But August does fucking dare. He finds a square brown metal door flap at the base of the right wall, the size of the cardboard base in a large banana box. A bronze latch keeps the flap fixed to a strip of wood in the floor. August loosens the latch, flips the door up and, slipping quickly onto his belly, uses his elbows to crawl through a tunnel running off the room.