Boy Swallows Universe. Trent Dalton

. . . would you care to respond, young man?’ Tytus said, puzzled.

      ‘He doesn’t talk,’ Lyle said.

      ‘What do you mean he doesn’t talk?’

      ‘He hasn’t spoken a word since he was six years old.’

      ‘Is he simple?’ Tytus asked.

      ‘No, he’s not simple,’ Lyle said. ‘Sharp as a tack, in fact.’

      ‘He’s one of those autistic boys, is he? Can’t function in society but he can tell me how many grains of sand are in my hourglass?’

      ‘There’s nothin’ wrong with him,’ I said, frustrated.

      Tytus turned his swivel chair to me.

      ‘I see,’ he said, studying my face. ‘So you’re the talker of the family?’

      ‘I talk when there’s somethin’ worth talkin’ about,’ I said.

      ‘Wisely talked,’ Tytus said.

He reached out his hand.

      ‘Give me your arm,’ he said.

      I held out my right arm and he gripped it with his soft and old hands, his palms so smooth it felt like they were covered in the Glad Wrap Mum kept in the third drawer down beneath the kitchen sink.

      He squeezed my arm hard. I looked at Lyle, he nodded assurance.

      ‘You’re scared,’ Tytus Broz said.

      ‘I’m not scared,’ I said.

      ‘Yes, you are, I can feel it in your marrow,’ he said.

      ‘Don’t you mean my bones?’

      ‘No, your marrow, boy. You are weak-boned. Your bones are hard but your bones are not full.’

      He nodded at August. ‘Marcel Marceau’s bones are hard and they are also full. Your brother possesses a strength that you will never have.’

      August shot a smug and knowing smile at me. ‘But I’ve got great finger bone strength,’ I said, flipping August the bird.

      That was when I spotted the human hand resting on a metal prop on Tytus’s desk.

      ‘Is that real?’ I asked.

      The hand looked real and unreal at the same time. Severed and capped cleanly at the wrist, all five fingers looked like they were made of wax or wrapped in Glad Wrap like Tytus’s felt.

      ‘Yes, it is, in fact,’ Tytus said. ‘That is the hand of a sixty-five-year-old bus driver named Ernie Hogg who kindly donated his body to the Anatomy students of the University of Queensland whose recent investigations into plastination have been most enthusiastically sponsored by yours truly.’

      ‘What’s plastination mean?’ I asked.

‘It’s where we replace water and body fats inside the limb with certain curable polymers – plastics – to create a real limb that can be touched and studied up close and reproduced, but the dead donor limb does not smell or decay.’

      ‘That’s gross,’ I said.

      Tytus chuckled. ‘No,’ he said with a strange and unsettling wonder in his eyes, ‘that’s the future.’

      There was a pottery figurine of an ageing man in chains on his desk. The ageing man was wearing an Ancient Greek man dress, and had oil paint blood streaks across his exposed back. He was mid-stride, favouring a leg that was missing a foot and bandaged roughly.

      ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

      Tytus turned to the figurine.

      ‘That’s Hegesistratus,’ he said. ‘One of history’s great amputees. He was an Ancient Greek diviner capable of profound and dangerous things.’

      ‘What’s a diviner?’ I asked.

      ‘A diviner is many things,’ he said. ‘In Ancient Greece the diviners were more like seers. They could see things others could not see by interpreting signs from the gods. They could see things coming, a valuable skill in war.’

      I turned to Lyle. ‘That’s like Gus,’ I said.

      Lyle shook his head. ‘All right, that’ll do, mate.’

      ‘What do you mean, boy?’ Tytus asked.

      ‘Gus sees things, too,’ I said. ‘Like Hegesistaramus or whatever here.’

      Tytus cast a new eye over August, who gave a half-smile, shaking his head, moving backwards to stand beside Lyle.

      ‘What things exactly?’

‘Just crazy things that sometimes turn out to be true,’ I said. ‘He writes them in the air. Like when he wrote Park Terrace in the air and I wondered what the hell he was talking about, then Mum came home and told us she was standing at a set of traffic lights while she was shopping in Corinda when she saw an old woman just step right out into traffic. Right out there into the middle of it all, not giving a shit—’

      ‘Watch your language, Eli,’ Lyle said, cross at me.

      ‘Sorry. So Mum drops all her grocery bags and takes two steps forward and reaches for this old woman and yanks her back hard to the footpath just as a big council bus is about to clean her up. She saved the old lady’s life. And guess what street that happened on?’

      ‘Park Terrace?’ Tytus said, eyes wide.

      ‘No,’ I said. ‘It happened on Oxley Avenue, but then Mum walks this old lady back to her house a few blocks down the road and this old woman doesn’t say a word at all, just has this dazed look on her face. Then they come to this woman’s house and the front door is wide open and one of the old casement windows is banging hard in the wind and the old woman says she can’t go up the front stairs and Mum tries to guide her up there but she goes crazy, “No, no, no, no,” she screams. And nods to Mum like she should go up those stairs, and because Mum has hard and full bones too, she climbs those stairs and she walks into the house and all the casement windows on all four sides of this old Corinda Queenslander are banging in the wind and Mum paces through this house and into the kitchen where there’s a ham and tomato sandwich being eaten by flies and this whole house stinks of Dettol and something darker underneath, something fouler, and Mum keeps walking through the living room, down a hallway, all the way to the house’s main bedroom and the door is closed and she opens it and she’s almost knocked out by the smell of the old dead guy sitting in an armchair by a king-size bed, his head wrapped in a plastic bag and a gas tank by his side. And guess what street this house was on?’

      ‘Park Terrace,’ Tytus said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘The cops came to the house and they pieced together the whole story and they told Mum how the old woman had found her husband like that in the bedroom a month before and she was so cross at him because he told her he was going to do it but she demanded he didn’t and he defied her and she was so pissed off with him and shocked by the situation that she simply pretended he wasn’t there. She closed the door on the main bedroom for a month, spreading Dettol around the house to mask the smell as she went about her daily business like making ham and tomato sandwiches for lunch. Finally, when the smell got too much, reality kicked in and she opened all the windows in the house and walked straight down to Oxley Avenue to throw herself in front of a bus.’

      ‘So where did Park Terrace come in?’ Tytus asked.

      ‘Well, that had nothing to do with Mum. That was Lyle who copped a speeding fine on Park Terrace while driving to work that same day.’

      ‘Fascinating,’ Tytus said.

      He looked at August, leaned forward in his swivel chair. There was something sinister in his eye then. He was old but he was threatening. It was the sucked-in cheekbones, the white hair, the something I felt in my weak bones. It was Ahab.