‘Do you mind if I take a quick snap, Mr Broz?’ Caitlyn asks.
‘Where do you want me?’ he replies.
‘Just back at the desk inside is fine,’ she says.
He sits back at his desk.
‘Big smile,’ Caitlyn says through the lens.
Caitlyn clicks a shot and the camera pops with a blinding flash that hurts all our eyes. Too bright. Stuns us all in the room.
‘Dear God,’ Tytus cries, rubbing his eyes. ‘Turn that flash off.’
‘Sorry, Mr Broz,’ Caitlyn says. ‘This camera must be faulty. Someone should toss it in the repairs cabinet.’
She aims her lens once more.
‘Just one more,’ Caitlyn says, like she’s talking to a three-year-old.
Tytus forces a smile. Fake smile. Artificial smile. Silicone-based.
*
In the Ford Meteor, Caitlyn tosses the camera by my feet in the front passenger seat. ‘Well, that was weird,’ she says.
She turns the ignition. Drives too fast out of Tytus Broz’s driveway.
I’m silent. She does the talking.
‘Okay, gut impressions first,’ she says, talking to herself as much as to her junior reporter. ‘I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but there is something rotten in the State of Queensland,’ she says, pressing hard on the accelerator as the car splits through Bellbowrie scrub on the black bitumen road back to Bowen Hills. ‘To pee or not to pee, that is the question? You ever seen anyone so creepy? You see his old bag of bones body rattling in that suit? He kept licking his lips like he was licking the sticky bit on an envelope.’
She’s rambling dot points, fast and loud. Sometimes she takes her eyes off the road to see my face. ‘I mean, what’s with his daughter and him? What about all that crazy stuff in his house? Okay, where do you want to start?’
I’m looking out the window. I’m thinking of Lyle in the front yard of the Darra house. I’m seeing him standing in his work clothes showered in a rainbow spray from my hose.
‘Let’s start at the end, huh, and work our way forward to the beginning,’ she says.
Forward to the beginning. I like that. That’s all I’ve ever been doing. Moving forward to the start.
‘I don’t know about you but my crazy-meter was tingling all over,’ she says. ‘There’s something wrong with all this, Eli. Something very, very wrong with all this.’
She’s rambling nervously. Filling the silence. She looks across at me. I turn my head to the road in front, repeated broken white bitumen lines lost under the car.
I know what I have to do.
‘I’ve gotta go back,’ I say. I say it louder than I intended. I say it with feeling.
‘Back?’ Caitlyn says. ‘Why do you want to go back?’
‘I can’t say,’ I say. ‘I have to be mute on this. There are things people can’t say. I know that now. There are things too impossible to say out loud so they’re best left unsaid.’
Caitlyn hits the brakes hard and turns the car sharply to a dirt bank on the side of the road. The front wheels lose traction momentarily and she reefs on the steering wheel to keep the vehicle from crashing into a rocky slope on my passenger side. She skids to a stop. Switches off the car.
‘Tell me why we should go back, Eli.’
‘I can’t, you’ll think I’m nuts.’
‘Don’t worry about me thinking you’re nuts because I’ve felt exactly that since the moment I met you,’ she says.
‘You have?’ I reply.
‘Sure,’ she says. ‘You’re a loon, but I mean that in the best possible way. Like a Bowie-type loon, Iggy Pop–type loon, Van Gogh–type loon.’
‘Astrid-type loon,’ I say.
‘Who?’
‘She was a friend of my mum’s when I was a kid,’ I say. ‘I thought she was nuts. But good nuts. Lovable nuts. She told us she heard voices and we all thought she was crazy. She said she heard a voice telling her my brother, August, was special.’
‘He sounds special, from what you’ve told me about him,’ Caitlyn says.
I breathe.
‘I’ve gotta go back,’ I say.
‘Why?’ she asks.
I breathe. Forward to the start. Backwards to the end.
‘The bird,’ I say.
‘What about the bird?’
‘A dead blue wren.’
‘Yeah, the wren?’
‘One day when I was a kid . . .’ And so ends my vow of silence. It lasted a staggering forty-three seconds. ‘. . . I was sitting in Slim’s car and he was teaching me how to drive a manual and I was distracted like I always am and I was staring out the window and I was watching Gus who was sitting on