Boy Swallows Universe. Trent Dalton

purple sky fountain.

      Lyle watches the firework flare out then he takes one more long drag of the Winfield and drops it at his feet, stubbing it out beneath his right boot. He puts his hands into the pockets of his roo-shooting coat and starts walking up the street in the direction of the firework.

      ‘C’mon, let’s go,’ I whisper.

      I stuff the rest of my luncheon meat and tomato sauce sandwich into my mouth so it must look like I’m eating two large marbles. August stays beneath the window eating his sandwich.

      ‘C’mon, Gus, let’s go,’ I whisper.

      He still sits there, processing like always, running the angles like always, weighing the options like always.

      He shakes his head.

      ‘C’mon, don’t you want to know where he’s going?’

      August gives a half-smile. The right forefinger that he just used to wipe up tomato sauce slashes through the air, scribbling the invisible lines of two words.

       Already know.

      *

      I’ve been following people for years. The key elements to a successful follow are distance and belief. Distance enough from the subject to remain undetected. Belief enough to convince yourself you’re not actually following the subject, even though you are. Belief means invisibility. Just another invisible stranger in a world of invisible strangers.

Cold out here. I give Lyle a good fifty-metre start. I’m just past the letterbox when I realise I’m barefoot in my winter pyjamas, the ones with the large hole over my right arse cheek. Lyle marches on, hands in his coat, drifting into the darkness beyond the streetlights that line the entrance to the Ducie Street Park across the road from our house. Lyle turns into a shadow, crossing the cricket pitch at the centre of the black oval, climbing up a hill that leads to a kids’ playground and the council barbecue that we had a sausage sizzle on for August’s thirteenth birthday last March. I’m creeping softly across the oval grass like a phantom, walking on air, ninja quiet, ninja quick. Snap. A thin dry stick breaks beneath my bare right foot. Lyle stops beneath a streetlight at the other side of the park. He turns and looks back into the park darkness engulfing me. He’s staring right at me but he can’t see me because I have distance and I have belief. I believe I am invisible. And Lyle does too. He turns from the park and walks on, head down, along Stratheden Street. I wait until he turns right into Harrington Street before I sprint out of the park darkness and into the exposed streetlights of Stratheden. A sprawling mango tree on the corner of Stratheden and Harrington provides the visual protection I need to watch Lyle, clear as day, take a left into Arcadia Street and into the driveway of Darren Dang’s house.

      *

      Darren Dang is in my grade at school. There’s only eighteen of us Year 7 students at Darra State School and we all agree that handsome Vietnamese-Australian Darren Dang is by far the most likely of us to become famous, probably for killing all eighteen of us in a classroom machine-gun massacre. Last month while we were working on projects about the First Fleet, making British ships out of Paddle Pop sticks, Darren passed by my desk. ‘Hey, Tink,’ he whispered.

      Eli Bell. Tinkerbell. Tink.

‘Hey, Tink. Bottle bins. Lunchtime.’

      That translated to, ‘You best come by the large yellow metal bottle recycling bins behind groundsman Mr McKinnon’s tool shed at lunchtime if you are at all interested in continuing your modest Queensland state school education with both of your ears.’ I waited for thirty minutes by the bottle bins and was thinking, with false hope, that Darren Dang might not make our impromptu rendezvous when he crept up behind me and gripped the back of my neck between his right forefinger and thumb. ‘If you saw ninjas, you’re seeing ghosts,’ he whispered. It’s a line from The Octagon. Two months earlier, during a Physical Education class, I’d told Darren Dang that I, like him, believed the Chuck Norris movie about a secret training camp for terrorist ninjas was the best movie ever made. I had lied. Tron is the best movie ever made.

      ‘Ha!’ laughed Eric Voight, Darren’s roly-poly empty-headed muscle from a family of roly-poly empty-headed mechanics who run the Darra Auto Transmission and Window Tinting shop across the road from the Darra brickworks. ‘Tinkerbell the fairy just shit his little fairy pants.’

      ‘Shat,’ I said. ‘Tinkerbell the fairy just shat his pants, Eric.’

      Darren turned to the bottle bins and dug his hands into a collection of Mr McKinnon’s empty spirits bottles.

      ‘How much does this guy drink?’ he said, clutching a Black Douglas bottle and sucking down half a capful of liquor resting at the bottom. He did the same with a small bottle of Jack Daniels, then a bottle of Jim Beam bourbon. ‘You good?’ he said, offering me the dregs of a Stone’s Green Ginger Wine.

      ‘I’m good,’ I said. ‘Why did you want to meet me?’

      Darren smiled and slung a large canvas duffle bag off his right shoulder.

      He reached into the duffle bag.

      ‘Close your eyes,’ Darren said.

Such requests from Darren Dang always end in tears or blood. But, like school, once you start with Darren Dang there’s no realistic way of avoiding Darren Dang.

      ‘Why?’ I asked.

      Eric pushed me hard in the chest: ‘Just close your eyes, Bell End.’

      I closed my eyes and instinctively cupped my hands over my balls.

      ‘Open your eyes,’ Darren said. And I opened my eyes to see a close-up view of a large brown rat, its two front teeth nervously buzzing up and down like a council jackhammer.

      ‘Fuckin’ell, Darren,’ I barked.

      Darren and Eric howled with laughter.

      ‘Found him in the storeroom,’ he said.

      Darren Dang’s mum, ‘Back Off’ Bich Dang, and his stepdad, Quan Nguyen, run the Little Saigon Big Fresh supermarket at the end of Darra Station Road, a one-stop super shop for Vietnamese imported vegetables, fruits, spices, meats and whole fresh fish. The storeroom at the rear of the supermarket, next to the meat locker, is, much to Darren’s joy, home to south-east Queensland’s longest and most well fed dynasty of obese brown rats.

      ‘Hold him for a second,’ Darren said, foisting the rat into my reluctant hands.

      The rat trembled in my palms, inactive with fear.

      ‘This is Jabba,’ Darren said, reaching into his duffle bag. ‘Grab his tail.’

      I half-heartedly gripped the rat’s tail with my right forefinger and thumb.

      Darren then pulled a machete from his duffle bag.

      ‘What the fuck is that?’

      ‘Granddad’s machete.’

The machete was longer than Darren’s right arm. It had a tan wooden handle and a large wide blade, rusting at its flat sides but oiled and silver and gleaming on its cutting edge.

      ‘No, you really gotta get a good grip on his tail or you’ll lose him,’ Darren said. ‘Really wrap your fist around the tail.’

      ‘You gotta hold it tight like you were holding your dick, Bell End, because he’ll take off,’ Eric said.

      I gripped the tail tight in my fist.

      Darren pulled a red cloth like a large handkerchief from his duffle bag.

      ‘Okay, now place him on the septic but don’t let him go,’ he said.

      ‘Maybe Eric should hold him?’ I said.

      ‘You’re holding him,’ Darren said, something unhinged in his eyes, something unpredictable.

      There was a concrete underground