Trent Dalton - Boy Swallows Universe

He gave a half-smile and he straightened me up with his hands on both my shoulders, stared into my eyes. ‘You’ve already got a dad, mate,’ he said. ‘But you got me, too.’

Five days later Mum was locked in Lena’s room, punching the thin fibro walls with her fists. Lyle had nailed wooden boards across the room’s two sets of windows. He’d dragged out Lena’s old bed and taken the Jesus picture off the wall, removed Lena’s old vases and framed photographs of distant relatives and close friends from the Darra Lawn Bowls Club. The room was bare but for a thin mattress with no sheets or blankets or pillows. For seven days Lyle kept Mum locked in that sky-blue room. Lyle, August and I would stand outside her locked door, listening to her screams, long and random banshee howls, as if beyond that locked door was a Grand Inquisitor overseeing some wicked variety of torture involving pulley systems and Mum’s outstretched limbs. But I knew for certain there was no one else in that room but her. She howled at lunch, she wailed at midnight. Gene Crimmins, our next-door neighbour on the right side, a retired and likeable postman with a thousand tales of misdirected mail and suburban kerbside happenstance, came over to check on things.

‘She’s almost there, mate,’ was all Lyle said at the front door. And Gene simply nodded like he knew exactly what Lyle was talking about. Like he knew how to be discreet.

On the fifth day, Mum singled me out because she knew I was the weakest.

‘Eli,’ she cried through the door. ‘He is trying to kill me. You need to call the police. Call them, Eli. He wants to kill me.’

I ran to our phone and I dialled three zeroes on the long rotary dial until August gently put his finger down on the receiver. He shook his head. No, Eli .

I wept and August put a gentle arm around my neck and we walked back down the hallway and stood staring at the door. I wept some more. Then I walked to the lounge room and I slid open the sliding bottom doors of the wood veneer wall unit that held Mum’s vinyl records. Between the Buttons by the Rolling Stones. The one she played so much, the one with the cover where they’re standing in their winter coats and Keith Richards is all blurred like he’s stepped halfway into a time portal that will take him to his future.

‘Hey, Eli, go to “Ruby Tuesday”,’ Mum always said.

‘Which one’s that?’

‘Side one, third thick line from the edge,’ Mum always said.

I unplugged the record player and I dragged it down the hall, plugged it in close to Lena’s door. Dropped the needle down, third thick line from the edge.

That song about a girl who never said where she came from.

The song echoed through the house and Mum’s sobbing echoed through the door. The song finished.

‘Play it again, Eli,’ Mum said.

On the seventh day, at sunset, Lyle unlocked the door. After two or three minutes, Lena’s bedroom door creaked open. Mum was thin and gaunt and waddling slowly like her bones were tied together with string. She tried to say something but her lips and her mouth and throat were so dry and her body was so spent that she couldn’t get the words out.

‘Gr …’ she said.

She licked her lips and tried again.

‘Gr …’ she said.

She closed her eyes, like she was faint. August and I watched and waited for some sign she was back, some sign that she was awake from the big sleep, and I guess that sign was the way she fell into Lyle’s arm and then collapsed onto the floor, clinging to the man who might have saved her life, and waving in the boys who believed he could do it. We huddled around her and she was like a fallen bird.

And in the cave of our bodies she chirped two words.

‘Group hug,’ she whispered. And we hugged her so tight we might have all formed into rock if we’d stuck around long enough. Formed into diamond.

Then she staggered, clinging to Lyle, to their bedroom. Lyle closed the bedroom door behind them. Silence. August and I immediately stepped softly into Lena’s room like we were treading lightly into a minefield in one of those North Vietnamese jungles of Duc Quang’s grandparents’ homeland.

There were scattered paper plates and food scraps across the floor amid clumps of hair. There was a bedpan in the corner of the room. The room’s sky-blue walls were covered in small holes the size of Mum’s fists and emanating from these holes were streaks of blood that looked like tattered red flags blowing in battlefield winds. A long brown streak of dried-up shit wound like a dirt road to nowhere along two walls. And whatever the battle was that Mum had been waging in that small bedroom, we knew she had just won it.

My mum’s name is Frances Bell.

August and I stand in silence in the hole. A full minute passes. August pushes me hard in the chest in frustration.

‘Sorry,’ I say.

Another two minutes pass in silence.

‘Thanks for taking the hit on whose idea it was.’

August shrugs. Another two minutes pass and the smell and the heat in this shithole grip my neck and my nose and my knowing.

We stare up to the circle of light, up through Lena and Aureli Orlik’s backyard wooden arse void.

‘Do you think he’s coming back?’

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