my head.
‘Did you grow up in the outer west?’ she asks. ‘I feel like I know you.’
Smile. Shake my head.
‘Nah, I’m north side,’ I say. ‘Grew up in Bracken Ridge.’
She nods. Staring into my eyes. Hanna Broz digs deep. She turns, scurries on down the hall.
A Napoleon bust. A bust of Captain Cook near a replica Endeavour. A painting of a lion tearing apart a grown man this time. The lion is tearing the man’s limbs off, has two legs and an arm piled beneath his feet, sinking its teeth into the man’s remaining arm.
‘You might have to be patient with Dad,’ Hanna says, pacing through a long dining room to the back of the mansion. ‘He’s not as . . . how should I say . . . robust . . . as he once was. You might have to repeat your questions a couple of times and remember to speak loudly and concisely. He can drift off sometimes like he’s on another planet. He’s had some ill health of late but he’s excited about these awards tonight. In fact, he has a surprise planned for all the guests and he wants to give you two a sneak preview.’
She opens two red wood doors to a vast reading room. It feels like the reading room of a royal. Two floor-to-ceiling walls of bookshelves, left side and right. Hundreds of hardback books with old bindings and gold lettering. Burgundy carpet. Blood-coloured carpet. The room smells like books and old cigar smoke. A dark green velvet reading lounge and two dark green velvet armchairs. There is a large mahogany writing desk at the end of the room and this is where Tytus Broz sits, eyes down, reading a thick hardback book. Behind him is a vast rear wall of glass so clean and pure you could squint your eyes and be convinced there wasn’t a glass wall there at all. The only clue to the door that’s been built into the centre of the glass wall are two sets of polished silver hinges that allow the door to open out to the magical and rambling lawn that runs seemingly for a kilometre or so, past concrete water fountains and perfectly angular hedges and flowerbeds tended by bees and perfect sunlight, down to what looks like a small vineyard, but that view must be a trick of the light because such things can’t be found in the lantana outskirts of Bellbowrie, Brisbane. Resting on his desk is a rectangular box about twenty-five centimetres tall and twenty centimetres wide, draped in a red silk covering cloth.
‘Dad,’ Hanna says.
He doesn’t look up from his reading. White suit. White hair. White spine in my back tingling to tell me to run. Run away now, Eli. Pull back. It’s a trap.
‘Excuse me, Dad,’ Hanna says, louder.
He flips his head up from his book.
‘The people from the paper are here to talk to you,’ Hanna says.
‘Who?’ he spits.
‘This is Eli and his photographer, Caitlyn,’ Hanna says. ‘They’ve come to talk to you about the award you are going to receive tonight.’
Some new sun of remembrance dawns in his mind.
‘Yes!’ he says, pulling the reading glasses from his eyes. He excitedly taps the box covered in the red silk. ‘Come. Sit. Sit.’
We move forward slowly, sit in the two elegant black visitor chairs at his desk. He’s so much older. The Lord of Limbs doesn’t seem as frightening as he seemed to a thirteen-year-old. Time, Slim. Changes faces. Changes stories. Changes points of view.
I could jump right over that desk and strangle his near-dead neck, stab my thumbs into his near-dead zombie eyes. The fountain pen. The fountain pen resting upright in the stand beside his desk phone. I could stab that fountain pen into his chest. His cold white chest. Stab my name into his heart. His cold white heart.
‘Thank you for your time, Mr Broz,’ I say.
He smiles and his lips tremble. His lips are wet with saliva.
‘Yes, yes,’ he says impatiently. ‘What would you like to know?’
I place my ExecTalk Dictaphone on the desk with my left hand, my unseen right hand and its missing digit gripping a pen to take notes on my lap beneath the desk top.
‘Do you mind if I record this?’ I ask.
He shakes his head.
Hanna steps back from us softly and takes a watchful owl position from the dark green reading lounge behind us.
‘You are being honoured at tonight’s Queensland Champions ceremony for your lifelong commitment to enhancing the lives