On our last Saturday drug run Lyle tells August and me about the underground room with the red phone. Lyle built the room himself, dug it out from the bottom up, dug a hole deep in the ground beneath the cramped space under the house that August and I were never allowed to crawl into, and up into the house. A secret space built from thirteen hundred bricks bought from the Darra brickworks. The secret room where Mum and Lyle could store large boxes of weed in their formative dope-dealing days.
‘What do you use it for now you’re not running weed?’ I ask.
‘It’s for a rainy day when I need to run away and hide,’ he says.
‘From who?’
‘From anyone,’ he says.
‘What’s the phone for?’ I ask.
Teddy looks across at Lyle.
‘It’s connected to a line that goes straight to another red phone just like it in Tytus’s house in Bellbowrie,’ Lyle says.
Lyle looks into the back seat to gauge our reactions.
‘So it was Tytus we were speaking to that day?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘No, Eli.’ We share a long look in the rearview mirror. ‘You weren’t speaking to anyone at all.’
He steps on the gas, speeds on to our last job.
*
‘I felt something today I never felt before,’ Mum says, forking spaghetti onto our dinner plates at the dinner table, the same laminated green Formica table with metal legs that Lyle ate cherry babka at as a boy.
Today was the school fete. For eight hours beneath a hot Saturday sun Mum was in charge of three sideshow alley stalls on the Richlands State High School oval. She ran the fishpond game where, for fifty cents, kids were tasked with hooking flat Styrofoam fish with a curtain rod and string; underneath these fish was a colour-coded sticker that corresponded with a colour-coded novelty toy prize worth approximately the value of the pony shit I stepped on today by the ‘Uncle Bob’s Barnyard’ animal display. The most popular game of the whole sideshow alley, by some way, was an original game that Mum developed herself, piggybacking on the irresistible pull of Star Wars to raise much-needed funds for the Richlands State High School Parents and Friends Association. Her ‘Han Solo Master Blaster Challenge’ asked potential saviours of the galaxy to dislodge three of August’s and my Imperial stormtroopers balanced on stands placed at increasingly ambitious distances, using a large water pistol she painted black to resemble Han’s trusty blaster. She placed the target stormtroopers masterfully, putting the first two at more than achievable distances, thus filling her largely five- to twelve-year-old customers up on the addictive lustre of early success, but placing the third and final stormtrooper at such a distance that a child would need to access and bend the powers of the Force to land a long and arcing single prize-winning water pistol shot. Mum was also, however, in charge of the fete’s least popular attraction, ‘Pop Stick Pandemonium’, one hundred pop sticks – ten marked with prize-winning stars – in a wheelbarrow full of sand. She could have promised the very meaning of life at the end of every one of those pop sticks and she still would have made $6.50 over eight hours.
‘I felt like part of the community,’ Mum says. ‘I felt like I belonged, ya know.’
I watch Lyle smiling at her. He has his right fist to his chin. All she’s doing is dumping large spoonfuls of her bolognese sauce with extra bacon and rosemary onto our plates, but Lyle is looking at her, wide-eyed and awed, like she’s playing ‘Paint It Black’ on a golden harp with strings made of fire.
‘That’s great, hon,’ Lyle says.
Teddy calls from the kitchen: ‘Beer, Lyle?’
‘Yeah, mate,’ Lyle says. ‘In the door shelf.’
Teddy’s staying for dinner. Teddy’s always staying for dinner.
‘That’s real great, Frankie,’ Teddy says, entering the living room from the kitchen. He wraps an arm around Mum’s shoulder unnecessarily. Holds her unnecessarily. ‘We’re proud of ya, matey,’ he says. All buddy buddy like. I mean, like, gimme a fucking break, Ted. Right here at Lena and Aureli’s table?
‘I might be mistaken, but is there a new little twinkle in those blue eyes?’ he says. He rubs his right thumb across Mum’s cheekbone.
Lyle and I share a glance. August shoots a look at me. Get a load of this shit. Right here in front of his best friend. I’ve never trusted this fuckin’ guy. Comes across all nice as pie but it’s those nice as pie fucks you really gotta watch