in a dish rack beside the sink. Someone’s cleaned up. Slim, I guess. I cup a hand beneath the kitchen tap and take a long drink of water. I open the fridge and find a knob of wrapped devon and a block of Coon cheese. I wonder how Slim ate on the lam. Water from creeks, robbing eggs from chook pens, maybe; stealing buns when bakers weren’t looking; plucking oranges from trees. Staying fed and watered is a public activity, raising one’s head is often required to make it work. There’s a loaf of Tip-Top bread on the kitchen bench and I smell it in the darkness and know immediately it’s green with mould. I take bites from the devon and the cheese, mixing them together in my mouth. Not the same without bread, but filling the yawning hole in my stomach. I take the red torch from the third drawer down below the kitchen sink. Pad straight to Lena’s room.
This room of true love. This room of blood. Jesus on the wall. The light from my torch lands on his sorrowful face and he looks so distant and aloof to me in the darkness.
My right hand is throbbing. My forefinger knuckle is hot and full with blood going nowhere. I need rest. I need to stop moving. I need to lie down. I slide Lena’s wardrobe door across, slide Lena’s old dresses along the rod they hang on. I push with my left hand against the wardrobe’s rear wall and it compresses and pops back open. Lyle’s secret door.
It has to be here. Why would it be anywhere else?
The light from my torch makes a small moon the size of a tennis ball bounce across the dirt ground of Lyle’s secret room. I slip down and my Dunlops dig into dirt. My torchlight finds every corner of the brick-walled room. Then it circles around the middle of the room, along the walls, across the red telephone. It has to be here. It has to be here. Why would he hide it anywhere else but his secret room built for hiding things in?
But the room is empty.
I hunch down and scramble for the secret door built into the wall of the secret room. I get a grip on the door flap and stick the torch into the tunnel Lyle has dug stretching to the thunderbox beyond. The tunnel is clear of snakes and spiders. Nothing but soil and thick air.
Fuck. Heart pounding. Got to do a piss. Don’t want to do this. Got to do this.
I collapse onto my belly and push myself into the hole with my kneecaps. I cradle my wounded right hand and pull myself along with my elbows scraping the dirt floor. Dirt falls into my eyes when my head bumps the tunnel ceiling. Breathe. Stay calm. Almost out. My torch shines down the tunnel and I can make something out, something resting on the floor of the thunderbox cavity. A box.
The sight of it makes me scramble quicker along the floor. I’m a crab. I’m a soldier crab. One of those little purple ones with a body like a marble. August and I would let them crawl over us in their hundreds on the shores of Bribie Island, Lyle’s favourite day-trip destination, an hour north of Brisbane. Lyle would pick two or three crabs up in his hand and they’d claw at his fingers and then he’d place them casually on top of our heads. The sun would set and there’d be nobody on the beach but us boys fishing and a couple of seagulls with their hungry eyes on our pilchards.
My head emerges from the tunnel into the thunderbox and the torchlight shines over a box. A white box. One of Bich Dang’s rectangular Styrofoam boxes. Of course he put it here. Of course he put it in the thunderbox.
I pull my legs up and hunch down with the torch over the box, flip the lid off with my left hand. And there is nothing in the box. The torchlight races across the box but no matter how many times I trace it back and forth, nothing appears inside. Empty. Tytus Broz got here first. Tytus Broz knows everything. Tytus Broz is one day older than the universe.
Kick the box. Kick this fucking Styrofoam box. Kick this fucking life of mine and kick fucking Lyle and fucking Tytus Broz and psychotic Iwan Krol and Mum and August and pissant Teddy and bullshit Slim who