speak. I want to ask him if he thinks he’s a good man but my lips don’t move. I want to ask him what moment in his life preceded his heart turning so cold and mechanised and his mind so mad. Then his hands return to my neck and he’s feeling the bones in my neck and his forefinger and thumb squeeze my Adam’s apple. Then he cleans his knife on my pants, wipes each side of it. And he breathes deep and I can feel his breath on my face. And he brings his clean blade to my neck.
Then the door to the engine room opens. Three police officers in sky-blue uniforms. They scream things.
My eyes closing. The police screaming.
‘Step back.’
‘Step back.’
‘Drop the knife.’
The cold blade on my neck.
An explosion. A gunshot. Two gunshots. Bullets bouncing on metal and concrete.
The knife momentarily released from my neck and I’m standing now, hauled to my feet by Iwan Krol. My vision blurs. I know he stands behind me and I know his blade is touching my Adam’s apple now and I know those shirts are blue in front of me. Men in blue with weapons raised.
‘You know I’ll do it,’ he says.
Then go ahead, I cannot say, I’m already dead. My end was a dead blue wren.
He pushes me forward and my legs move with him. And the movement of feet moves my jacket and something inside my jacket moves. I reach inside my jacket pocket with the four fingers of my right hand gripping something made of glass. Something cylindrical. A jar.
‘Back,’ Iwan Krol bellows. ‘Get back.’
The blade presses hard against my throat. We’re so close together I feel his breath and his spit in my earhole. And we stop because the police can’t go back any further.
‘Put the knife down,’ one officer says, trying to calm things. ‘Don’t do this.’
Time stops, Slim. Time does not exist. It is frozen in this moment.
Then it starts again because it is given something human to understand it, something we built to remind us of ageing, a deafening bell that chimes above us. A bell I did not see above me when I entered this engine room. A bell tolling nine times. Clang. Clang. Clang. The sound clogs our eardrums. Stifles our minds. And temporarily clouds Iwan Krol’s sense of awareness because he does not defend himself from the glass specimen jar holding my severed forefinger which I smash against his right side temple. He reels back and the knife is momentarily lifted from my neck, long enough for me to drop to the ground hard, a dead weight drop, landing on my arse and rolling over like a party-trick dog playing dead.
I don’t see where the bullets go from the guns of the officers. Just my perspective through a dead man’s eyes. That’s my perspective on this moment, Slim. Face flat on concrete. The world turned on its side. The black polished shoes of police officers moving to something behind me. A figure running through the door to the engine room. A face leaning down into my view.
My brother, August. My eyes are closing. Blink. My brother, August. Blink.
He whispers in my right ear.
‘You’re gonna be okay, Eli,’ he says. ‘You’re gonna be okay. You come back. You always come back.’
I can’t speak. My mouth won’t let me speak. I’m mute. My left forefinger scribbles a line in the air only my older brother will read before the line disappears.
Boy swallows universe.
Boy Swallows Universe
This is not heaven. This is not hell. This is Boggo Road prison yard Number 2 Division.
It’s empty. Not a soul alive in the place, except . . . except for the man kneeling down, tending the prison garden in his prison clothes with his prison-issue spade. A garden of red and yellow roses; lavender bushes and purple irises under full sun and cloudless blue sky.
‘Hey, kid,’ the man says without seeing me.
‘Hey, Slim,’ I say.
He stands, dusts soil from his kneecaps and his palms.
‘The garden’s lookin’ real great, Slim.’
‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘If I can keep them bastard caterpillars off it, she’ll go all right.’
He drops his spade and nods his head to the side.
‘C’mon,’ he says, ‘we gotta get you outta here.’
He walks across the yard. The grass is thick and green and swallows my feet. He walks me to a thick brown brick wall skirting behind Number 2 Division cell block. A knotted rope hangs from a wedged grappling hook high above us.