day I learned to drive and, forever more, the missing brick and the moon pool and Slim’s Toyota LandCruiser and the crack in Slim’s windscreen and my lucky freckle, and everything about my brother, August, will remind me of her.
‘What name?’ Slim asks.
‘Caitlyn.’
Caitlyn. There’s no doubt about it. Caitlyn. That right forefinger and an endless blue sky sheet of paper with that name on it.
‘You know anyone named Caitlyn?’ asks Slim.
‘No.’
‘What’s the second word?’
I follow August’s finger, swirling through the sky.
‘It’s “spies”,’ I say.
‘Caitlyn spies,’ Slim says. ‘Caitlyn spies.’ He drags on his cigarette, contemplatively. ‘What the fuck does that mean?’
Caitlyn spies. No doubt about it.
Your end is a dead blue wren. Boy swallows universe. Caitlyn spies.
No doubt about it.
These are the answers.
The answers to the questions.
Boy Makes Rainbow
This room of true love. This room of blood. Sky-blue fibro walls. Off-colour paint patches where Lyle has puttied up holes. A made-up queen bed, tightly tucked white sheet, an old thin grey blanket that wouldn’t have been out of place in one of those death camps Lyle’s mum and dad were escaping from. Everybody running from something, especially ideas.
A framed Jesus portrait over the bed. The son and his jagged crown, reasonably calm for all the blood dripping down his forehead – so cool under pressure that guy – but frowning like always because August and I aren’t supposed to be in here. This still blue room, the quietest place on earth. This room of true companionship.
Slim says the mistake of all those old English writers and all those matinee movies is to suggest true love comes easy, that it waits on stars and planets and revolutions around the sun. Waits on fate. Dormant true love, there for everybody, just waiting to be found, erupting when the thread of existence collides with chance and the eyes of two lovers meet. Boom. From what I’ve seen of it, true love is hard. Real romance has death in it. It has midnight shakes and flecks of shit across a bedsheet. True love like this dies if it has to wait for fate. True love like this asks lovers to cast aside what is meant to be and work with what is.
August leads, boy wants to show me something.
‘He’ll kill us if he finds us in here.’
Lena’s room is out of bounds. Lena’s room is sacred. Only Lyle enters Lena’s room. August shrugs. He grips a flashlight in his right hand, passes Lena’s bed.
‘This bed makes me sad.’
August nods knowingly. It makes me sadder, Eli. Everything makes me sadder. My emotions run deeper than yours, Eli, don’t forget it.
The bed sags on one side, weighed down on one half for the eight years that Lena Orlik slept alone on it without the balancing weight of her husband, Aureli Orlik, who died of prostate cancer on this bed in 1968.
Aureli died quiet. Died as quiet as this room.
‘Reckon Lena’s watching us right now?’
August smiles, shrugs his shoulders. Lena believed in God but she didn’t believe in love, or at least the kind written in stars. Lena didn’t believe in fate because if her love of Aureli was meant to be then the birth and the whole unholy and deranged headfuck adulthood of Adolf Hitler was also meant to be because that monster, ‘that filthy potwor’, was the only reason they met in 1945 in an American-run displaced persons holding camp in Germany where they stayed for four years, long enough for Aureli to collect the silver that formed Lena’s wedding ring. Lyle was born in the camp in 1949, spent his first night on earth sleeping in a large iron wash bucket, wrapped in a grey blanket like the one right here on this bed. America wouldn’t take Lyle and Great Britain wouldn’t take Lyle, but Australia would and Lyle never forgot this fact, which is why, during a wildly misspent youth, he never burned or vandalised property marked Made in Australia.
In 1951 the Orliks arrived at the Wacol East Dependants Holding Camp for Displaced Persons, a sixty-second bike ride from our house. For four years they lived among two thousand people sharing timber huts with a total of three hundred and forty rooms, with communal toilets and baths. Aureli landed a job pegging sleepers for the new rail line between Darra and neighbouring suburbs, Oxley and Corinda. Lena worked in a timber factory in Yeerongpilly, in the south-west, cutting sheets of plywood alongside men twice her size and with half her pluck.