out for, Eli. I can’t tell who he’s in love with more: Mum, Lyle or himself.
I nod. Hearing you, brother.
‘I don’t know,’ Mum shrugs, a little embarrassed by her sunny disposition. ‘It just felt good to be part of something so . . .’
‘Boring?’ I offer. ‘Suburban?’
Mum smiles, holding a spoonful of bolognese mince in midair as she thinks.
‘So normal,’ she says.
She dumps the mince on top of my pasta and gives me one of those quick and beautiful half-smiles that she can send down a one-way corridor of devotion directly to the person she is aiming at, a tunnel of lifelong love invisible to all others, yet I know August has a tunnel just like it, and Lyle does too.
‘It’s great, Mum,’ I say. And I’ve never been more serious in my life. ‘I reckon normal suits ya.’
I reach for the Kraft parmesan cheese that smells like August’s vomit. I sprinkle cheese flakes across my spaghetti and I dig my fork into Mum’s pasta and twirl the fork twice.
Then Tytus Broz walks into our living room.
The top of my spine knows him best. The top of my spine recognises all that white hair and that white suit and the gritted white teeth in his forced smile. The rest of me is frozen and confused but my spine knows that Tytus Broz really is walking into our living room and it shivers from top to bottom and I shudder involuntarily like I do sometimes when I’m taking a piss in the troughs of Lyle’s favourite pub, the Regatta Hotel in Toowong.
Lyle’s mouth is full of pasta when he sees Tytus, watches him, stunned, as he paces into our house, somehow finding his way in from the back door beyond the kitchen past the toilet.
Lyle says his name like a question. ‘Tytus?’
August and Mum are facing Lyle and me across the table and they turn their bodies around to see Tytus walking in, followed by another man, bigger than Tytus, darker eyes, darker mood. Oh fuck. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck me. What’s he doing here?
Iwan Krol. And two more of Tytus’s muscle goon thugs walking in behind Iwan. They wear rubber flip-flops like Iwan Krol, tight Stubbies shorts and tucked-in button-up collared cotton shirts; one of them is wiry and bald and the other is heavy with an upturned smile and three chins.
‘Tytus!’ Mum says, slipping immediately into host mode. She hops up from her chair.
‘Please don’t hop up, Frances,’ Tytus says.
Iwan Krol rests a hand gently on Mum’s shoulder and something in the gesture tells her to sit back down. It’s now that I see he’s carrying an army-green duffle bag, which he drops silently onto the living room floor by the table.
Teddy is holding a fork in his right hand. He has two paper towels stuffed into the neckline of his dark blue Bonds shirt, and his lips are red with bolognese sauce, like a clown who smudges his lipstick. ‘Tytus, is everything okay?’ Teddy asks. ‘You want to join us for . . .’
Tytus isn’t even looking at Teddy when he puts a forefinger to his mouth and says, ‘Sssshhh.’
He’s looking at Lyle. Silence. Maybe a whole minute of silence or maybe it’s just thirty seconds but it feels like thirty days of thunderclap-loud-as-fuck silent staring between Tytus and Lyle. Vantage points and details, a single moment stretched to infinity.
A tattoo on the wiry goon’s left arm. Bugs Bunny in a Nazi uniform. August gripping his pasta spoon, nervously thumbing the handle. This moment from Mum’s point of view, sitting confused in a loose peach-coloured singlet, her head darting between faces, searching for answers and finding none but the answer on the face of the only man she has ever really loved. Fear.
Then Lyle mercifully cuts the silence.
‘August,’ he says.
August? August? What the fuck does this moment have to do with August?
August turns back around and stares at Lyle.
And Lyle starts writing something in the air. His right forefinger flows swiftly through the air like a quill and August’s eyes track the flurry of words that I can’t make out because I’m not facing him and I can’t spin them around properly in my mirror mind.
‘What’s he doing?’ Tytus spits.
Lyle keeps writing words in the air, swiftly and surely, and August reads them, nodding his head in understanding with every word.
‘Stop that,’ spits Tytus.
Tytus screams. ‘Stop that shit!’ He turns to the heavy goon and through gritted teeth, he furiously screams, ‘Please stop him doing that fucking shit.’