in the centre of his forehead. It turns the colour and shape of the old black tennis balls August and I own that have been rubbed and handball-bashed raw from countless games in the middle of Sandakan Street. He steps back again, the rage building and exploding and building again inside him with every step back, shoulders circling in their sockets, his fists clenching. Taurus the Bull wants to die today.
Lorraine speaks urgently into her intercom. ‘That’s reinforced glass, Mr Leary,’ she says. ‘You cannot break through it.’
Challenge accepted. Raymond Leary in his frayed camel-coloured suit and his sad attack on a wall of reinforced glass. He charges again. Whack. And the impact knocks him down. He lands hard on his left shoulder. Spit coming from his mouth. Groggy and drunk on his own madness. He lurches to his feet, a tear in the left shoulder of his suit jacket. He’s dizzy and confused. Moving from side to side. For a moment he turns his back to the glass and this is the moment I choose to rush to the front door of the office.
‘Eli, what are you doing?’ Caitlyn Spies barks.
I open the door.
‘Eli, stop, don’t go out there,’ Caitlyn Spies warns. ‘Eli!’
I go out there. I slip out the entry door and close it quickly behind me.
Raymond Leary wobbles on his feet, punch-drunk. He steps three times to his side and stops on the spot and turns to set his eyes on me. There’s a split across his forehead and his forehead is black and swollen and the split throbs with blood and this red blood spills down his face, down the mountain of a busted nose, across the ridges of his trembling lips, along the plain of his wide and dimpled chin and onto his crisp white business shirt and tie.
‘Stop it,’ I say.
He stares into my eyes and he tries to understand me and I think he does because he breathes and that’s what humans do. We breathe. And we think. But we get mad too. We get so sad and we get so mad.
‘Please stop it, Raymond,’ I say.
And he breathes again and he steps back. Confused by this moment. Confused by this boy before him. Across the road, at a hole-in-the-wall snack shop selling meat pies and chips with gravy, several men in workwear are looking over at this scene.
The street is quiet. No cars passing. This moment is frozen in time. The bull and the boy.
I can hear him breathing. He’s exhausted. He’s spent. Something registers in his eyes. Something human.
‘They don’t want to hear my story,’ he says.
He turns to the glass wall and finds himself in the mirrored reflection.
‘I’ll hear your story,’ I say.
His right hand rubs the swelling in his forehead. Blood covers his fingers and his fingers trace the blood running down his face. His right palm finds the blood now and the palm rubs the blood in circles around his forehead. He rubs it across his whole face. The colour red. He turns to me like he’s just woken up from a dream. How did I get here? Who are you? He shakes his head in disbelief. And he drops his head and the workmen from the meat pie shop are crossing the road now and Raymond Leary seems to have stopped.
‘You all right, kid?’ calls one of the workmen.
And, with that, Raymond Leary raises his head and finds himself again in the glass and he runs at himself in the glass and his bloody face meets his bloody face and both versions of Raymond Leary fall unconscious to the ground.
Three workmen rush across the road, form a half-circle around Raymond Leary.
‘What the fuck’s his malfunction?’ one of the workmen asks.
I say nothing. I just stare at Raymond Leary. He lies flat on his back with his arms outstretched and his legs outstretched like he was drawn up for scientific study by da Vinci.
Caitlyn Spies emerges cautiously from the front door, looking at Raymond Leary flat on his back.
Caitlyn’s fringe hangs over her face and a light gust of wind blows it about like there’s a puppet in a dress dancing across her forehead and the sun makes Caitlyn Spies beautiful because it lights up her face and makes her move outside of time, outside of life, like she’s walking in slow motion along the edge of the universe.
She walks over to me. Over to me, Eli Bell. Boy on the lam. Boy in trouble.