grey carpet. A water cooler with plastic white cups. A white sign-in desk, a short and stocky woman behind the desk in a crisp white security shirt with navy blue epaulettes on her shoulders. She smiles.
‘Just take a seat and she’ll be out soon,’ the woman says, nodding me towards a two-seat couch and an armchair by the water cooler. Concern on her face.
‘You okay?’ she asks.
I nod.
‘You don’t look okay,’ she says. ‘Your face is all red and sweaty.’
She looks at my strapped hand.
‘Who did that dressing?’
I look down at the dressing. The bandage is coming loose, creased in parts, too tight in others, like I received first aid from a blind drunk.
‘My mum did it,’ I say.
The woman on the desk nods, doubt across her face.
‘Grab yourself a water,’ she says.
I fill a plastic cup, glug it down with the cup collapsing in my left hand. Fill another and glug it down just as fast.
‘How old are you?’ the woman asks.
‘I turn fourteen in five months,’ I say.
I am changing, desk woman, inside and out. My legs are getting longer like my past. I have twenty-plus hairs growing from my right underarm.
‘So you’re thirteen,’ she says.
I nod.
‘Your parents know you’re here?’
I nod.
‘You been walkin’ a bit, ay?’ she asks.
I nod.
She casts her eyes over my backpack resting at my feet.
‘You goin’ some place?’ she asks.
I nod.
‘Where you goin’?’ she asks.
‘Well, I was goin’ here. Then I got here. And after here I’ll probably go some place else. But that depends.’
‘On what?’ asks the woman behind the desk.
‘On Caitlyn Spies.’
The woman smiles and turns her head and what she’s looking at makes me stand up.
‘Well, speak of the devil.’
I stand up the way a thirteen-year-old Aztec boy might have stood up on a beach when he saw a Spanish fleet cutting across the horizon.
She walks towards me. Not towards the security woman behind the desk. Not to the water cooler. Not to the entry door. But towards me. Eli Bell. The most beautiful face I’ve never seen. I saw that face standing on the edge of the universe. That face spoke to me. That face has always spoken to me. Her deep brown hair is tied back and she wears thick black-rimmed spectacles and a white long-sleeve shirt that hangs loosely over light blue acid-wash jeans and the bottom of her jeans hang over brown leather boots. She carries a pen in her right hand and in that same hand she carries a small yellow Spirax notepad the size of her palm.
She stops before me.
‘You know Slim Halliday?’ she asks flatly.
And I freeze for two seconds and then my brain tells my mouth to open and then my brain tells my voice box to respond but nothing comes out. I try again but nothing comes out. Eli Bell. Speechless, nothing to say as he stands on the edge of the universe. My voice has temporarily left me, abandoned me like my confidence and my cool. I turn to the water cooler and pour myself another cup of water. As I drink it down my bandaged right hand begins unconsciously scribbling words in thin air. He’s my best friend, I write on the air with my club of a bandaged hand. He’s my best friend.
‘What are you doing?’ Caitlyn Spies asks. ‘What is that?’
‘Sorry,’ I say, relieved to hear the word come out of my mouth. ‘My brother, Gus, talks like that.’
‘Like what?’ Caitlyn Spies asks. ‘You looked like you wanted to paint a house but you didn’t have a paintbrush.’
I really did look like that, didn’t I? She’s so funny. So insightful.
‘My brother, Gus, doesn’t talk. He writes his words in the air.’
‘Cute,’ she says sharply. ‘But I’m on deadline, so you want to hurry up and tell me how you know Slim Halliday?’
‘He’s my best friend,’ I say.
She laughs.
‘You’re Slim Halliday’s best friend? Slim Halliday hasn’t been seen in the flesh in three years. Most presume he’s dead already. And you’re telling me he’s alive and well and best friends with a . . . what are you, twelve?’
‘I’m thirteen,’ I say. ‘Slim was good friends first with . . . well . . . Slim was my babysitter.’
She shakes her head.
‘Your parents had you babysat by a convicted killer?’ she says. ‘The Houdini of Boggo Road? The greatest escapee ever locked away in an Australian clink? A man who’d happily sell the kidneys of a thirteen-year-old boy if it meant a clean getaway? That’s some classy parenting