‘extra work’ that Lyle spoke of earlier this evening. The man sitting next to Teddy in a grey suit and maroon tie with black hair like a newsreader’s looks a hell of a lot like our local council member, Stephen Bourke, the man who sends us magnetised calendars each year that keep Mum’s shopping lists pinned to the refrigerator. He sips from a glass of white wine. Yeah, in fact, I’m certain that’s our local member. ‘Stephen Bourke – Your Local Leader’ the calendar reads. Stephen Bourke, right here at the table of Tytus Broz, ‘Your Local Dealer’.
The thing about Tytus Broz that reminds me most of bones is that every time I see him – and this is only my second sighting of him – I get a shiver down my spine. He smiles at me now and he smiles at Mum and he smiles at August, but I don’t buy that pistachio-nut-sucker smile for a second. I don’t know why. Just something in my bones.
*
The first time I met Tytus Broz was two years ago when I was ten years old. Lyle was taking me and August to the roller-skating rink in Stafford, on the north side of Brisbane, but on the way he had to drop in to his work at Moorooka to fix a faulty lever on the machine that shaped the artificial arms and legs that paid for Tytus Broz’s bone-white suits. It was the old warehouse back then, before the business was overhauled into the whole Human Touch modern manufacturing plant of today. The warehouse was an aluminium shed the size of a tennis court, with giant ceiling fans to fight the suffocating heat of all that sun-baked metal housing a thousand fake limbs spread across hooks and shelves that led past plaster-makers casting body shapes and mechanics turning screws into fake bent knees and fake bent elbows.
‘Don’t touch anything,’ Lyle ordered as he led us past endless leg limbs standing in a row like a Moulin Rouge can-can troupe miraculously dancing without their torsos. We walked through rows of arms hanging on hooks from the ceiling and these arms had plastic hands that touched my face as we passed and I pictured those arms connected to the bodies of dead Arthurian knights impaled and hanging from long spears in the ground and their hands were reaching out for help that August and I could not give because Lyle insisted we didn’t touch anything, not even the reaching hand of the great Sir Lancelot du Lac. I saw those arms and legs coming alive, reaching at me, clutching for me, kicking at me. That warehouse was the end of a hundred bad horror movies, the start of a hundred nightmares I was yet to have.
‘These are Frances’s boys, August and Eli,’ Lyle said, ushering us into Tytus Broz’s office at the back of the warehouse. August was the taller and the older so he walked into the office first and it was August who captivated Tytus from the start.
‘Come closer, young man,’ Tytus said.
August looked up at Lyle for assurance and an exit out of that moment, but Lyle didn’t give it, he just nodded at August like he should do what was polite and walk closer to the man who was putting the meat and three veg on our table every night.
‘Give me your hand,’ Tytus said from a swivel chair at a red-brown antique work desk. There was a framed painting of a giant white whale above this desk. It was Moby Dick, from what Lyle told me later was Tytus Broz’s favourite book, the one about the elusive whale hunted by an obsessive-compulsive amputee who could have benefited from having a Human Touch prosthetics and orthotics sales centre and warehouse in downtown Nantucket. I asked Slim soon after that if he’d ever read Moby Dick and he said he’d read it twice because it’s worth reading a second time, though he said second time around he skipped the bit where the writer goes on about all the different species of whales found across the world. I asked Slim to tell me the whole story from start to finish and for two hours while we washed his LandCruiser he told me that thrilling adventure tale so enthusiastically I wanted Nantucket fish chowder for lunch and white whale steaks for dinner. When he described Captain Ahab, with his wild-eyed face and his age and his thinness and his whiteness, I pictured Tytus Broz