‘Yeah, I’m good,’ I say, spreading my legs out for a better sleeping position.
‘It’s good to see you, Gus,’ I say.
‘It’s good to see you, Eli,’ he says.
‘It’s good to talk to you,’ I say.
He smiles.
‘It’s good to talk to you,’ he says. ‘Get some sleep. Everything’s gonna be all right.’
‘You really think so?’ I ask.
He nods.
‘Don’t worry, Eli,’ he says. ‘It gets good.’
‘What gets good?’
‘This life of ours,’ he says.
‘How do you know it gets good?’
‘The man on the phone told me.’
I nod. Nah, we’re not crazy. We’re just tired. We just need some sleep.
‘Night, Gus,’ I say.
‘Night, Eli.’
The light goes off and darkness fills the room. August steps over me to get to his bed. I hear the springs in his bed sink down as he lies back. Silence. Eli and August Bell together again in another black bedroom. Slim says he would sometimes open his eyes in darkness like this, the darkness upon darkness underground in Black Peter, and he’d pretend the darkness wasn’t darkness at all. It was just space, he says. Deep space. Deep universe.
‘Gus?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think Lyle is still alive?’
Silence. A long silence.
‘Gus?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘I was just checking you hadn’t stopped talking again.’
Silence.
‘Please don’t stop talking to me, Gus. I like talking to you.’
‘I won’t stop talking to you, Eli.’
Silence. Deep universe silence.
‘Do you think Lyle is still alive?’ I ask.
‘What do you think, Eli?’
I think about this. I think about this often.
‘You remember what Lyle used to say about the Parramatta Eels when he really knew the team was gonna get beat but he didn’t want to admit it?’
‘Yeah,’ August says.
Silence.
‘Do you remember what he said?’
‘Yeah, sorry,’ August says. ‘I just wrote it in the air.’
‘Good,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to say it.’
Just keep it in the air. That’s where Lyle Orlick can stay, maybe. In the air. In my head. In my heart. In my rage. In my vengeance. In my hatred. In my time that will come. In my universe.
‘You remember that day we ate all the mulberries?’ August asks.
I remember. The mulberry tree that hung over the back fence of the Darra house, flopped over the fence lazily from Dot Watson’s house behind us. Slim was looking after us that day but he didn’t know we had eaten so many fat burgundy mulberries that day until I vomited a purple river after lunch. I ran out the back door off the laundry but I didn’t make it to the grass. I chucked up the purple river all across the path that led to the clothesline. A purple stain splashed across the concrete like someone had dropped a bottle of fine red wine on it. Slim had no sympathy for my aching belly, just made me wash it up with Pine-O-Cleen and hot water. Once I’d cleaned it all up, Slim said he wanted to make a mulberry pie like the ones he had eaten in a boys’ home down south.
‘Remember the story he told us about the boy who had the universe in his mouth?’ August asks.
We were pulling mulberries off the tree when Slim started telling us about some story he read in Boggo Road once, a story about some god, or some special guy from a religion different from the wooden cross one we knew, not one where Jesus was the hero, but one that was spoken of in the kinds of places Slim said Indiana Jones liked to visit. He said there was this special boy who was actually a special man and this special boy was running around with a bunch of other kids, older kids, playing near a sprawling fruit tree. And the older kids didn’t let this special boy climb the fruit tree with them because he was too small but they let him pick up the fruits that fell from the tree as they climbed. The older kids warned the boy not to eat the fruits because they weren’t clean. ‘Just collect them,’ said an older boy. But the boy began stuffing his mouth with the fat and juicy purple fruits that lay on the ground. He ate these fruits like he was possessed, so ravenous for them that he started picking them up with clumps of earth and shoving them in his busy mouth, fruit and soil together, shoving them in so hard that purple fruit rivers started flowing from the sides of his mouth. ‘What are you doing?’ the older boys