August. He walks towards me. A big curling smile on his face with his gold medal bouncing on his chest as he springs along the polished wooden floors of the stage wing. But his smile fades when he sees my smile fade.
‘What is it, Eli?’
‘I found him, Gus.’
‘Who?’
I open the black tote bag and August looks inside. He stares down into the bag. August says nothing.
He nods his head to the side. Follow me.
He hurries to the door of a green room running off the side-of-stage area, opens it swiftly. A carpeted room. Tables and chairs. Hard black instrument cases. Speaker equipment. A fruit platter of orange and rockmelon skins, watermelon pieces half eaten. August shuffles to a chrome tool tray on wheels. On the tray sits a box covered in a red silk cloth. A name card sits beside it. Tytus Broz. August lifts one corner of the silk cloth to reveal Tytus Broz’s glass box holding his prototype-silicone-arm life’s work. His big reveal. His great gift to the State of Queensland.
August doesn’t say something. What he doesn’t say is, Pass me the bag, Eli.
*
We slip back out the side of the black curtain into the hall’s side thoroughfare. Moving quickly now. The brothers Bell. The survivors, Eli and August, the Queensland Champion. The gold medallist and his younger brother who worships him. Walking hard. Then the official who gave me the evil eye before gives me that same evil eye again as she passes back down the walkway and time slows in this moment because that woman is ushering a man to the backstage area. An old man dressed in white. White suit. White hair. White shoes. White bones. The old man catches sight of my face late and my face registers in his mind only after I’ve passed by his shoulder. Time and perspective. Time doesn’t exist and from any perspective this scene would always see Tytus Broz stop and scratch his head as he wonders about the young man he passed carrying the black tote bag just like the one he keeps in his bunker of very bad things. But from any perspective he would be puzzled because when time resumed at normal speed we would always be gone. Escaped. Gone to see our mum and dad.
*
‘And at last we come to our final award for the evening, ladies and gentlemen,’ says the newsreader MC. ‘One single award winner truly deserving of our inaugural Queensland Senior Champion Award.’
I’m squeezing past the knees of the long-suffering six people sitting next to us in Row M. August waits in the central aisle.
I’m gesturing to Mum that we need to go. Throwing thumbs over my shoulder, pointing at August. I reach my seat.
‘We need to go, guys,’ I say.
‘Don’t be so rude, Eli,’ Mum says. ‘We’ll stay for the last award.’
I put a hand on Mum’s shoulder. Serious face. Never more serious face.
‘Please, Mum,’ I say. ‘You don’t want to see this one.’
And the Channel Seven newsreader joyfully calls the inaugural Queensland Senior Champion to the stage.
‘Tytus Broz,’ she sings.
Mum’s eyes turn from me to the stage and it takes a moment to connect the name with the figure in the white suit moving slowly onto the stage to accept his award.
She stands. She says nothing. She moves.
*
‘What’s the bloody rush?’ Dad asks as we reach the grand entry doors of Brisbane City Hall.
But his train of thought is derailed by the flashing lights of two police cars on the paved King George Square, the cars parked in a V-shape blocking in Caitlyn’s Ford Meteor.
Maybe ten sky-blue-uniformed police officers walking towards us. Two more police officers carefully assisting Bevan Penn to the back of a police car. Bevan’s gaze finds me in the chaos. He nods. Appreciation in that nod. Confusion. Survival. Silence.
‘What the fuck’s goin’ on ’ere?’ Dad ponders aloud.
Caitlyn Spies walks among the police officers. She leads them, in fact. Spies digs deep. She enters the hall foyer and points through the doors of the auditorium.
‘He’s already up there,’ she says. ‘That’s him in the white.’
The police officers file into the auditorium.
‘What’s going on, Eli?’ Mum asks.
Our eyes follow the police officers as they assume positions throughout the auditorium waiting for Tytus Broz to finish a long and self-inflating speech about the past four decades he has dedicated to Queensland’s disabled community.