hand on my left shoulder. Her hand on me. Boy on the lam. Boy in love.
‘Are you okay?’ she asks.
‘I’m okay,’ I say. ‘Is he . . .?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. She looks closer at Raymond Leary, then steps back, shaking her head.
‘You’re a brave boy, Eli Bell,’ she says. ‘Stupid, but stupid brave.’
The sun is in me now. The sun is my heart, and all the world – the fishermen in China and the corn farmers in Mexico and the fleas on the backs of the dogs in Kathmandu – relies on the rising and falling of my full heart.
A police car pulls up on the side of the road, its front right wheel biting into the concrete guttering. Two male police officers exit the vehicle and rush to Raymond Leary on the ground. ‘Step back, please,’ says one officer, slipping on a pair of gloves as he kneels down to Raymond Leary. A pool of blood builds on the concrete beside Raymond’s left ear.
Police.
‘Goodbye, Caitlyn Spies,’ I say.
I step back from the small group gathered around Raymond.
‘Huh?’ she says. ‘Where you going?’
‘I’m going to see my mum,’ I say.
‘But what about your story?’ she asks. ‘You haven’t told me your story.’
‘The timing’s not right,’ I say.
‘The timing?’
‘The time’s not right,’ I say, walking backwards.
‘You’re a curious boy, Eli Bell,’ she says.
‘Will you wait?’ I ask.
‘Wait for what?’ she asks.
Lorraine from the front desk calls out to Caitlyn from the group surrounding Raymond Leary. ‘Caitlyn,’ she says, ‘the officers have some questions.’
Caitlyn turns her head to Lorraine and the police and the scene before the wall of glass. And I run. I sprint up Spine Street and my bony legs are quick but maybe not quicker than Christmas.
Wait for the universe, Caitlyn Spies. Wait for me.
Boy Stirs Monster
The moon pool. All the way out here on the northern fringe of the city. The full midnight moon shines for August Bell anywhere, so why wouldn’t it shine for him in Bracken Ridge, home of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
Number 5 Lancelot Street. Robert Bell’s small orange brick house in the Queensland Housing Commission cluster of small orange brick homes just down the hill from Arthur Street and Gawain Road and Percivale Street and Geraint Street. Here sits Sir August the Mute, in the gutter by a black letterbox fixed to a weather-beaten stick. He has a garden hose resting on his right thigh as he fills a flat pan of Lancelot Street bitumen in precise angles to reflect a full moon so vivid that the man inside it can be seen with his lips wet whistling ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’.
I watch him from behind a blue Nissan family van parked five houses further up the street. He looks up at the moon then he kinks the garden hose in his hands so the water stops and the moon pool stills, reflecting a perfect silver moon. Then he reaches for an old rusted 7-iron golf club that sits beside him and he stands and he leans over the moon pool and stares into his reflection. He flips the club upside down and, with the handle end, he taps the very centre of his pool. And he sees things only he can see.
Then he looks up and sees me.
‘So I guess you can talk when you want to?’ I say.
He shrugs his shoulders, scribbles in the air. Sorry Eli.
‘Say it.’
He drops his head. Considers something for a moment. Looks back up.
‘Sorry,’ he says.
Boy sounds soft and fragile and nervous and unsure. Boy sounds like me.
‘Why, Gus?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why the fuck weren’t you talking?’
He breathes.
‘Safer that way,’ he says. ‘Can’t hurt anyone that way.’
‘What are you talking about, Gus?’
August looks down at the moon pool. He smiles.
‘Can’t hurt you, Eli,’ he says. ‘Can’t hurt us. There are things I want to say, but if I said them, Eli, people would be frightened by those things.’
‘What things?’
‘Big things. The kinds of things that people would not understand, things that would make people misunderstand me if I said them. Then they’d misunderstand us, Eli. And then they’d take me away and who’d be left to look after you.’
‘I can get by just fine on my own.’
August smiles. He nods.
A streetlight shines above us. All the lights in all the houses in the street are off, except for the living room light of our house.
He nods me over. I stand beside him and we stare into the moon pool. Watch