Boy Swallows Universe. Trent Dalton

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СКАЧАТЬ dealers since I found a five-hundred-gram brick of Golden Triangle heroin stowed in the mower catcher in our backyard shed five days ago. I feel certain Mum and Lyle are drug dealers when Slim tells me they have gone to the movies to see Terms of Endearment.

      Slim gives me a sharp look. ‘Slide over, smartarse,’ he mumbles from the corner of his mouth.

      Clutch in. First. Steadily on the pedally. The car jolts forward and we’re moving. ‘Give it some gas,’ Slim says. My bare right foot goes down, leg fully extended, and we cross our lawn all the way to Mrs Dudzinski’s rosebush on the kerbside next door.

      ‘Get onto the road,’ Slim says, laughing.

      Hard right on the wheel, off the gutter onto the Sandakan Street bitumen.

      ‘Clutch in, second,’ Slim barks.

      Quicker now. Past Freddy Pollard’s place, past Freddy Pollard’s sister, Evie, pushing a headless Barbie down the street in a toy pram.

       ‘Should I stop?’ I ask.

      Slim looks in the rearview mirror, darts his head to the passenger side mirror. ‘Nah, fuck it. Once round the block.’

      Slip into third and we’re rumbling at forty kilometres an hour. And we’re free. It’s a breakout. Me and Houdini. On the run. Two great escapologists on the lam.

      ‘I’m driiiiving,’ I scream.

      Slim laughs and his old chest wheezes.

      Left into Swanavelder Street, on past the old World War II Polish migrant centre where Lyle’s mum and dad spent their first days in Australia. Left into Butcher Street where the Freemans keep their collection of exotic birds: a squawking peacock, a greylag goose, a Muscovy duck. Fly on free, bird. Drive. Drive. Left into Hardy, left back into Sandakan.

      ‘Slow her down,’ says Slim.

      I slam the brakes and lose footing on the clutch and the car cuts out, once again parallel to August, who is still writing words on thin air, lost in the work.

      ‘Did ya see me, Gus?’ I holler. ‘Did ya see me driving, Gus?’

      He doesn’t look away from his words. Boy didn’t even see us drive away.

      ‘What’s he scribblin’ now?’ Slim asks.

      The same two words over and over again. The crescent moon of a capital ‘C’. Chubby little ‘a’. Skinny little ‘i’, one descending stroke in the air with a cherry on top. August sits in the same spot on the fence that he usually sits on, by the missing brick, the space two bricks along the fence from the red wrought-iron letterbox.

      August is the missing brick. The moon pool is my brother. August is the moon pool.

      ‘Two words,’ I say. ‘A name starting with “C”.’

      I will associate her name with the day I learned to drive and, forever more, the missing brick and the moon pool and Slim’s Toyota LandCruiser and the crack in Slim’s windscreen and my lucky freckle, and everything about my brother, August, will remind me of her.

      ‘What name?’ Slim asks.

      ‘Caitlyn.’

      Caitlyn. There’s no doubt about it. Caitlyn. That right forefinger and an endless blue sky sheet of paper with that name on it.

      ‘You know anyone named Caitlyn?’ asks Slim.

      ‘No.’

      ‘What’s the second word?’

      I follow August’s finger, swirling through the sky.

      ‘It’s “spies”,’ I say.

      ‘Caitlyn spies,’ Slim says. ‘Caitlyn spies.’ He drags on his cigarette, contemplatively. ‘What the fuck does that mean?’

      Caitlyn spies. No doubt about it.

      Your end is a dead blue wren. Boy swallows universe. Caitlyn spies.

      No doubt about it.

      These are the answers.

      The answers to the questions.

      

      This room of true love. This room of blood. Sky-blue fibro walls. Off-colour paint patches where Lyle has puttied up holes. A made-up queen bed, tightly tucked white sheet, an old thin grey blanket that wouldn’t have been out of place in one of those death camps Lyle’s mum and dad were escaping from. Everybody running from something, especially ideas.

      A framed Jesus portrait over the bed. The son and his jagged crown, reasonably calm for all the blood dripping down his forehead – so cool under pressure that guy – but frowning like always because August and I aren’t supposed to be in here. This still blue room, the quietest place on earth. This room of true companionship.

      Slim says the mistake of all those old English writers and all those matinee movies is to suggest true love comes easy, that it waits on stars and planets and revolutions around the sun. Waits on fate. Dormant true love, there for everybody, just waiting to be found, erupting when the thread of existence collides with chance and the eyes of two lovers meet. Boom. From what I’ve seen of it, true love is hard. Real romance has death in it. It has midnight shakes and flecks of shit across a bedsheet. True love like this dies if it has to wait for fate. True love like this asks lovers to cast aside what is meant to be and work with what is.

      August leads, boy wants to show me something.

      ‘He’ll kill us if he finds us in here.’

      Lena’s room is out of bounds. Lena’s room is sacred. Only Lyle enters Lena’s room. August shrugs. He grips a flashlight in his right hand, passes Lena’s bed.

      ‘This bed makes me sad.’

      August nods knowingly. It makes me sadder, Eli. Everything makes me sadder. My emotions run deeper than yours, Eli, don’t forget it.

      The bed sags on one side, weighed down on one half for the eight years that Lena Orlik slept alone on it without the balancing weight of her husband, Aureli Orlik, who died of prostate cancer on this bed in 1968.

      Aureli died quiet. Died as quiet as this room.

      ‘Reckon Lena’s watching us right now?’

      August smiles, shrugs his shoulders. Lena believed in God but she didn’t believe in love, or at least the kind written in stars. Lena didn’t believe in fate because if her love of Aureli was meant to be then the birth and the whole unholy and deranged head-fuck adulthood of Adolf Hitler was also meant to be because that monster, ‘that filthy potwor’, was the only reason they met in 1945 in an American-run displaced persons holding camp in Germany where they stayed for four years, long enough for Aureli to collect the silver СКАЧАТЬ