Boy Swallows Universe. Trent Dalton

source is pushing the invisible pen that scribbles his invisible writing. Slim rests his arms on the steering wheel, takes a long drag of his rollie, not taking his eyes off August.

      ‘What’s he writin’ now?’ Slim asks.

      August’s oblivious to our stares, his eyes only following the letters in his personal blue sky. Maybe to him it’s an endless ream of lined paper that he writes on in his head, or maybe he sees the black writing lines stretched across the sky. It’s mirror writing to me. I can read it if I’m facing him at the right angle, if I can see the letters clear enough to turn them round in my head, spin them round in my mirror mind.

      ‘Same sentence over and over this time.’

      ‘What’s he sayin’?’

      The sun over August’s shoulder. White hot god of a thing. A hand to my forehead. No doubt about it.

      ‘Your end is a dead blue wren.’

      August freezes. He stares at me. He looks like me, but a better version of me, stronger, more beautiful, everything smooth on his face, smooth like the face he sees when he stares into the moon pool.

      Say it again. ‘Your end is a dead blue wren.’

      August gives a half-smile, shakes his head, looks at me like I’m the one who’s crazy. Like I’m the one who’s imagining things. You’re always imagining things, Eli.

      ‘Yeah, I saw you. I’ve been watching you for the past five minutes.’

      He smiles wide, furiously wiping his words from the sky with an open palm. Slim smiles wide too, shakes his head.

      ‘That boy’s got the answers,’ Slim says.

      ‘To what?’ I wonder.

      ‘To the questions,’ Slim says.

      He reverses the LandCruiser, takes her back three metres, brakes.

      ‘Your turn now.’

      Slim coughs, chokes up brown tobacco spit that he missiles out the driver’s window to our sun-baked and potholed bitumen street running past fourteen low-set sprawling fibro houses, ours and everybody else’s in shades of cream, aquamarine and sky blue. Sandakan Street, Darra, my little suburb of Polish and Vietnamese refugees and Bad Old Days refugees like Mum and August and me, exiled here for the past eight years, hiding out far from the rest of the world, marooned survivors of the great ship hauling Australia’s lower-class shitheap, separated from America and Europe and Jane Seymour by oceans and a darn pretty Great Barrier Reef and another 7000 kilometres of Queensland coastline and then an overpass taking cars to Brisbane city, and separated a bit more still by the nearby Queensland Cement and Lime Company factory that blows cement powder across Darra on windy days and covers our rambling home’s sky-blue fibro walls with dust that August and I have to hose off before the rain comes and sets the dust to cement, leaving hard grey veins of misery across the house front and the large window that Lyle throws his cigarette butts out of and I throw my apple cores out of, always following Lyle’s lead because, and maybe I’m too young to know better, Lyle’s always got a lead worth following.

      Darra is a dream, a stench, a spilt garbage bin, a cracked mirror, a paradise, a bowl of Vietnamese noodle soup filled with prawns, domes of plastic crab meat, pig ears and pig knuckles and pig belly. Darra is a girl washed down a drainpipe, a boy with snot slipping from his nose so ripe it glows on Easter night, a teenage girl stretched across a train track waiting for the express to Central and beyond, a South African man smoking Sudanese weed, a Filipino man injecting Afghani dope next door to a girl from Cambodia sipping milk from Queensland’s Darling Downs. Darra is my quiet sigh, my reflection on war, my dumb pre-teen longing, my home.

      ‘When do you reckon they’ll be back?’ I ask.

      ‘Soon enough.’

      ‘What’d they go see?’

      Slim wears a thin bronze-coloured button-up cotton shirt tucked into dark blue shorts. He wears these shorts constantly and he says he rotates between three pairs of the same shorts but every day I see the same hole in the bottom right-hand corner of his rear pocket. His blue rubber thongs are normally moulded to his old and callused feet, dirt-caked and sweat-stunk, but his left thong slips off now, caught on the clutch, as he slides awkwardly out of the car. Houdini’s getting on. Houdini’s caught in the water chamber of Brisbane’s outer western suburbs. Even Houdini can’t escape time. Slim can’t run from MTV. Slim can’t run from Michael Jackson. Slim can’t escape the 1980s.

      ‘Terms of Endearment,’ he says, opening the passenger door.

      I truly love Slim because he truly loves August and me. Slim was hard and cold in his youth. He’s softened with age. Slim always cares for August and me and how we’re going and how we’re going to grow up. I love him so much for trying to convince us that when Mum and Lyle are out for so long like this they are at the movies and not, in fact, dealing heroin purchased from Vietnamese restaurateurs.

      ‘Lyle choose that one?’

      I have suspected Mum and Lyle are drug dealers since I found a five-hundred-gram brick of Golden Triangle heroin stowed in the mower catcher in our backyard shed five days ago. I feel certain Mum and Lyle are drug dealers when Slim tells me they have gone to the movies to see Terms of Endearment.

      Slim gives me a sharp look. ‘Slide over, smartarse,’ he mumbles from the corner of his mouth.

      Clutch in. First. Steadily on the pedally. The car jolts forward and we’re moving. ‘Give it some gas,’ Slim says. My bare right foot goes down, leg fully extended, and we cross our lawn all the way to Mrs Dudzinski’s rosebush on the kerbside next door.

      ‘Get onto the road,’ Slim says, laughing.

      Hard right on the wheel, off the gutter onto the Sandakan Street bitumen.

      ‘Clutch in, second,’ Slim barks.

      Quicker now. Past Freddy Pollard’s place, past Freddy Pollard’s sister, Evie, pushing a headless Barbie down the street in a toy pram.

       ‘Should I stop?’ I ask.

      Slim looks in the rearview mirror, darts his head to the passenger side mirror. ‘Nah, fuck it. Once round the block.’

      Slip into third and we’re rumbling at forty kilometres an hour. And we’re free. It’s a breakout. Me and Houdini. On the run. Two great escapologists on the lam.

      ‘I’m driiiiving,’ I scream.

      Slim laughs and his old chest wheezes.

      Left into Swanavelder Street, on past the old World War II Polish migrant centre where Lyle’s mum and dad spent their first days in Australia. Left into Butcher Street where the Freemans keep their collection of exotic birds: a squawking peacock, a greylag goose, a Muscovy duck. Fly on free, bird. Drive. Drive. Left into Hardy, left back into Sandakan.

      ‘Slow her down,’ says Slim.

      I slam the brakes and lose footing on the clutch and the car cuts out, once again parallel to August, who is still writing words on thin air, lost in the work.

      ‘Did ya see me, Gus?’ I holler. ‘Did ya see me driving, Gus?’

      He doesn’t look away from his words. Boy didn’t even see us drive away.

      ‘What’s he scribblin’ now?’ Slim asks.

      The same two words over and over again. The crescent moon of a capital ‘C’. Chubby little ‘a’. Skinny little ‘i’, one descending stroke in the air with a cherry on top. August sits in the same spot on the fence that he usually sits on, by the missing brick, the space two bricks along the fence from the red wrought-iron letterbox.

      August is the missing brick. The moon pool is my brother. August is the moon pool.

      ‘Two words,’ I say. ‘A name starting with “C”.’

      I will associate