asked. ‘What are you doing? Explain yourself. Give us some answers. Give us all the answers.’ But the boy said nothing. He did not speak. He could not speak, with his mouth so full of tainted fruit. The older kids demanded he stop but the boy kept eating, so they ran to fetch the boy’s mother. ‘Your boy is eating mud!’ the older kids hollered. The boy’s mother, mad as hell, demanded her son open his mouth to show her the evidence of his recklessness, his greed, his insanity. ‘Open your mouth!’ she barked. And the boy opened his mouth and the mother looked inside and saw trees and snow-capped mountains and blue sky and all the stars and all the moons and planets and suns of the universe. And the mother hugged her boy close. ‘Who are you?’ she whispered. ‘Who are you? Who are you?’
‘Who was he?’ I asked Slim.
‘He was the boy with all the answers,’ Slim said.
*
I speak into the darkness of our bedroom.
‘The boy had a whole world inside of him,’ I say.
‘The boy who swallowed the universe,’ August says.
Silence in the dark.
‘Gus,’ I say.
‘Yeah?’ August replies.
‘Who is the man on the red phone?’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t think you’re ready to know,’ he says.
‘I’m ready to know.’
A long pause in the universe.
‘You just wrote it in the air, didn’t you?’ I say.
‘Yes,’ he says.
‘Please tell me, Gus. Who’s the man on the red phone?’
A long pause in the universe.
‘It’s me, Eli.’
Boy Loses Balance
I will remember Mrs Birkbeck through the plastic Santa Claus dancing on a coil spring next to the phone on Mrs Birkbeck’s office desk. Second week of December. Last week of school. Christmas is coming. Sleigh bells ring. Are you listening?
Poppy Birkbeck is the Nashville State High School guidance counsellor with the sunshine smile and the remarkably impervious optimism that refuses to shatter in a daily world of aborted teenage pregnancies and drug-addicted sixteen-year-olds and suburban Bracken Ridge child molesters touching up boys with wildly aggressive behavioural disorders who go home to wildly ignorant parents who go to dinner with suburban Bracken Ridge child molesters.
‘Frankly, Eli,’ says Mrs Birkbeck, ‘I don’t know why we don’t just remove you from school altogether.’
Nashville High has nothing to do with Tennessee. Nashville was a suburb between Bracken Ridge and Brighton, further north towards Redcliffe, before it got squeezed out – obliterated – by time and progress. Nashville High is a thirty-minute walk from our house, through a tunnel passing under the main road that takes locals to the Sunshine Coast. I’ve been at the school six weeks now. On the second day a Year 10 boy named Bobby Linyette welcomed me to school by inexplicably spitting on my left shoulder as I passed by the Social Science building’s water cooler. It was a golly, a real deep snort of a golly, filled with yellowy phlegm and snot and all that is wrong with Bobby Linyette, who sat laughing on the Social Science port racks amid a group of giggling zit-faced hyena buddies with mullet cuts. Bobby Linyette raised his right hand and hid his right forefinger as he waved his hand around. ‘Where is pointer? Where is pointer?’ he sang, a kindergarten teacher singing in the tune of ‘Frère Jacques’.
I looked down at my missing forefinger. My skin was winning the war on the open wound, gradually closing around the bone, but I still had to wear a small dressing over it, all the more eye-catching to wild schoolyard lions like Bobby Linyette.
Then his pointer forefinger appeared. ‘Here I am. Here I am.’ He guffawed. ‘Fuckin’ freak,’ he said.
Bobby Linyette is fifteen years old and has two chins and chest hair. In the third week of my enrolment, Bobby Linyette’s friends held me down as Bobby squirted the entire contents of a tomato sauce bottle from the tuckshop into my hair and down the back of my shirt. I did not report these deeply frustrating acts to the teachers because I didn’t want something as mind-numbingly predictable as school bullying upsetting my plan. August offered to stab Bobby Linyette in the ribs with Dad’s fishing knife, but I asked him not to because I knew that, apart from the fact it was well past the time when August had to stop fighting my battles, this too would upset my plan. In the beginning of this sixth week of my enrolment, in the tunnel underpass as I was walking home from school last Monday,