to suffer a case of gold fever. ‘The glittery sickness,’ he says. ‘Sent ol’ Pat round the bend.’
Slim shifts the gear stick.
‘Be careful to push the clutch down. First. Release the clutch.’
Gentle push on the accelerator.
‘And steadily on the pedally.’
The hulking LandCruiser moves forward three metres along our grassy kerbside and Slim brakes, the car parallel to August still writing furiously into thin air with his right forefinger. Slim and I turn our heads hard left to watch August’s apparent burst of creativity. When he finishes writing a full sentence he dabs the air as though he’s marking a full stop. He wears his favourite green T-shirt with the words You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet written across it in rainbow lettering. Floppy brown hair, borderline Beatle cut. He wears a pair of Lyle’s old blue and yellow Parramatta Eels supporter shorts despite the fact that, at thirteen years of age, at least five of which he has spent watching Parramatta Eels games on the couch with Lyle and me, he doesn’t have the slightest interest in rugby league. Our dear mystery boy. Our Mozart. August is one year older than me but August is one year older than everybody. August is one year older than the universe.
When he finishes writing five full sentences he licks the tip of his forefinger like he’s inking a quill, then he plugs back into whatever mystical source is pushing the invisible pen that scribbles his invisible writing. Slim rests his arms on the steering wheel, takes a long drag of his rollie, not taking his eyes off August.
‘What’s he writin’ now?’ Slim asks.
August’s oblivious to our stares, his eyes only following the letters in his personal blue sky. Maybe to him it’s an endless ream of lined paper that he writes on in his head, or maybe he sees the black writing lines stretched across the sky. It’s mirror writing to me. I can read it if I’m facing him at the right angle, if I can see the letters clear enough to turn them round in my head, spin them round in my mirror mind.
‘Same sentence over and over this time.’
‘What’s he sayin’?’
The sun over August’s shoulder. White hot god of a thing. A hand to my forehead. No doubt about it.
‘Your end is a dead blue wren.’
August freezes. He stares at me. He looks like me, but a better version of me, stronger, more beautiful, everything smooth on his face, smooth like the face he sees when he stares into the moon pool.
Say it again. ‘Your end is a dead blue wren.’
August gives a half-smile, shakes his head, looks at me like I’m the one who’s crazy. Like I’m the one who’s imagining things. You’re always imagining things, Eli.
‘Yeah, I saw you. I’ve been watching you for the past five minutes.’
He smiles wide, furiously wiping his words from the sky with an open palm. Slim smiles wide too, shakes his head.
‘That boy’s got the answers,’ Slim says.
‘To what?’ I wonder.
‘To the questions,’ Slim says.
He reverses the LandCruiser, takes her back three metres, brakes.
‘Your turn now.’
Slim coughs, chokes up brown tobacco spit that he missiles out the driver’s window to our sun-baked and potholed bitumen street running past fourteen low-set sprawling fibro houses, ours and everybody else’s in shades of cream, aquamarine and sky blue. Sandakan Street, Darra, my little suburb of Polish and Vietnamese refugees and Bad Old Days refugees like Mum and August and me, exiled here for the past eight years, hiding out far from the rest of the world, marooned survivors of the great ship hauling Australia’s lower-class shitheap, separated from America and Europe and Jane Seymour by oceans and a darn pretty Great Barrier Reef and another 7000 kilometres of Queensland coastline and then an overpass taking cars to Brisbane city, and separated a bit more still by the nearby Queensland Cement and Lime Company factory that blows cement powder across Darra on windy days and covers our rambling home’s sky-blue fibro walls with dust that August and I have to hose off before the rain comes and sets the dust to cement, leaving hard grey veins of misery across the house front and the large window that Lyle throws his cigarette butts out of and I throw my apple cores out of, always following Lyle’s lead because, and maybe I’m too young to know better, Lyle’s always got a lead worth following.
Darra is a dream, a stench, a spilt garbage bin, a cracked mirror, a paradise, a