Now I’m Houdini and here’s my great blink-and-you’ll-miss-it illusion: slipping off my hospital gown to reveal the civilian, non-fugitive clothes I have on underneath: an old dark blue polo shirt and black jeans over my blue and grey Dunlop KT-26 running shoes. I roll the gown up into a ball of blue material I’m holding in my left hand just as the elevator stops at Level 2 of the hospital.
Two male doctors holding clipboards step into the elevator, deep in conversation.
‘I said to the kid’s dad, maybe if he’s having this many concussions on the field you should consider a more low-impact sport, like tennis or golf,’ says one doctor as I move to the back left corner of the elevator, the ball of my gown hidden behind my back.
‘What did he say to that?’ the other doctor asks.
‘He said he couldn’t take him out of the team because the finals were coming up,’ the first doctor says. ‘I said, “Well, Mr Newcombe, I think it comes down to what’s more important to you, an under-15s premiership trophy for Brothers or your son having enough brain function to say the word ‘premiership’.”’
The doctors shake their heads. The first doctor turns to me. I smile.
‘You lost, buddy?’ he asks.
I’ve planned for this. Rehearsed a number of responses over the lamb roast dinner I didn’t eat last night.
‘No, just visiting my brother in the children’s ward,’ I say.
The elevator stops on the ground floor.
‘Your mum and dad with you?’ the doctor asks.
‘Yeah, they’re just having a smoke outside,’ I say.
The elevator doors open and the doctors exit right and I exit towards the hospital foyer, polished concrete floors buzzing with hospital visitors and ambulance officers pushing gurneys. The first doctor spots the bandage on my right hand and stops on the spot. ‘Hey, wait, kid . . .’
Just keep walking. Just keep walking. Confidence. You are invisible. You believe you are invisible and you are invisible. Just keep walking. Past the water cooler. Past a family surrounding a girl with Coke-bottle glasses in a wheelchair. Past a poster of Norm, the beer-bellied dad at the centre of the ‘Life. Be In It.’ TV ads that make August laugh so hard.
I glance a look back over my right shoulder to see the first doctor walk to the administration desk and start talking to a woman at the desk as he points at me. Walking faster now. Faster now. Faster. You are not invisible, you idiot. You are not magic. You are a thirteen-year-old boy about to be captured by that large Pacific Islander security guard the doctor is now talking to and you are about to be sent to live with a father you do not know.
Run.
*
The Royal Brisbane Hospital is on Bowen Bridge Road. I know this area because the Brisbane Exhibition – the Ekka – is held every August a little up the road in the old showgrounds where Mum and Lyle let August and me eat all the contents of our Milky Way showbags one afternoon while we watched five large men from Tasmania furiously chop logs between their feet with axes to rousing applause. We caught the train back home to Darra from Bowen Hills train station – somewhere around here – and on the moving train I vomited the contents of my Milky Way bag into an Army Combat showbag that consisted of a plastic machine gun, a plastic hand grenade, a sling of ammunition and a jungle camouflaged headband that I’d hoped to wear on several top secret rescue missions through the streets of Darra until the headband was drowned in vomit that was two parts chocolate thickshake and one part Dagwood Dog.
A daylight moon outside the hospital. Cars zipping along Bowen Bridge Road. There’s a large grey electrical box on the footpath running by the hospital. I slip behind this box and watch the Pacific Islander security guard rush out of the sliding entry doors of the hospital. He looks left, right, left again. Searching for leads, finding none. He approaches a woman in a green cardigan and fluffy slippers, having a smoke by a bus stop seat and a council bin with an ashtray.
Run now. Catch up to the crowd of people crossing the busy main road at the traffic lights. Walk into the centre of this crowd. Boy on the lam. Boy outfoxes hospital staff. Boy outsmarts world. Boy suckers universe.