What, Eli? What are we meant to be exactly? What exactly are you talking about?
The answers to the questions. Your end is a dead blue wren. Caitlyn Spies.
Boy. Swallows. Universe.
I bet August knows what we’re meant to be.
‘Never mind,’ I say. I rub my eyes.
‘Are you all right?’ Caitlyn asks. ‘Can I call your parents for you?’
‘No, I’m all right,’ I say. ‘I’m just tired.’
‘What happened to your hand?’ she asks.
I stare at my bandaged hand. Tytus Broz. That’s what you came here for. Tytus Broz. Not Caitlyn Spies.
‘Listen, I’m going to tell you a story but you must be very careful about what you do with it,’ I say. ‘The men I’m about to tell you about are very dangerous. These men do terrible things to people.’
She looks serious now. ‘Tell me what happened to your hand, Eli Bell,’ she says.
‘Do you know a man named Tytus Broz?’ I whisper.
‘Tytus Broz?’ she ponders.
She starts to scribble the name in her notebook.
‘Don’t write it down,’ I say. ‘Just remember the name if you can. Tytus Broz.’
‘Tytus Broz,’ she says again. ‘Who is Tytus Broz?’
‘He’s the man who took my—’
But I don’t finish that sentence because a fist bashes against the office’s glass shopfront, just above where we’re sitting. I duck down instinctively and so does Caitlyn Spies. Bang. Bang. Two fists now.
‘Oh shit,’ says Lorraine on the front desk. ‘It’s Raymond Leary.’
‘Call the police, Lorraine,’ Caitlyn says.
*
Raymond Leary wears a camel-coloured suit and tie with a white business shirt. Mid-fifties. His face is round and his hair is straw-coloured and scarecrow-straggly. His belly is large and his fists are fat and they bash the shopfront glass with such fury the whole glass panel rattles in place and the water cooler inside shakes a little too. Lorraine presses a button at her desk, speaks into an intercom.
‘Mr Leary, please step back from the glass,’ she says.
Raymond Leary screams. ‘Let me in,’ he barks. He puts his face against the glass. ‘Let me in!’
Caitlyn moves to the front desk and I follow her. Raymond Leary bashes again on the glass. ‘Stay back from the glass,’ Caitlyn warns me.
‘Who is he?’ I ask, moving to Caitlyn’s side.
‘State government knocked his house down to build an exit road off Ipswich Motorway,’ she says. ‘Raymond got screwed in the process and then his wife got depression and she threw herself in front of a cement truck on the Ipswich Motorway, just before the new exit road was built over her house.’
‘So why’s he bashing on your window?’ I ask.
‘Because we won’t tell his story,’ Caitlyn says.
Raymond’s clenched fists bang against the window.
‘Call the police, Lorraine,’ Caitlyn says again.
Lorraine nods. Picks up her desk phone.
‘Why won’t you tell his story?’ I ask.
‘Because our paper campaigned for the government to put that exit road in,’ she says. ‘Eighty-nine per cent of our readers wanted improvements made to that section of the motorway.’
Raymond Leary takes five methodical steps back from the glass.
‘Oh fuck,’ Caitlyn Spies says.
Raymond Leary runs at the glass wall. It takes a moment to actually comprehend that he does this, that this moment is real, because it’s so wrong, so truly out of the norm, that it seems impossible. But it is happening. He is really running headfirst at the glass wall and his wide and fatty forehead flesh really does hit the glass wall first with all the weight of, what, a hundred and fifty kilos pushing behind it and the impact is so dramatic and hard that Caitlyn Spies and Lorraine behind the desk and me, Eli Bell – solo adventurer, hospital escapee, lam boy – draw breath sharply and brace for the inevitable shattering of all that dangerous glass but it doesn’t give, it just rattles in place, and Raymond Leary’s head snaps back like he’s broken his neck and I see his eyes register what he’s done and his eyes say he’s mad, his eyes say he is now animal, his eyes say he is Taurus the Bull.
‘Yes, the office of the South-West Star, 64 Spine Street, Sumner Park. Please hurry,’ Lorraine says down the phone.
He staggers and regathers his footing and then he steps back seven paces this time and he breathes and he charges again at the glass. Smack. His head whips back further this time and his legs give way beneath him. Stop it, Raymond Leary. Stop it. A lump emerges