‘Hello?’
The voice of a man.
‘Hello.’
A real man type man, deep voice. A man in his fifties maybe, sixties even.
‘Who is this?’ I ask.
‘Who do you think this is?’ the man replies.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Of course you do.’
‘No, I really don’t.’
‘Yes, you do. You have always known.’
August smiles, nodding his head. I think I know who it is.
‘You’re Tytus Broz?’
‘No, I am not Tytus Broz.’
‘You’re a friend of Lyle’s?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re the man who gave Lyle the Golden Triangle heroin I found in the mower catcher?’
‘How do you know it was Golden Triangle heroin?’
‘My friend Slim reads The Courier-Mail every day. When he’s finished with the paper he passes it to me. The crime desk has been writing stories about heroin spreading through Brisbane from Darra. They say it comes from the main opium-producing area of South-East Asia that overlaps Burma, Laos and Thailand. That’s the Golden Triangle.’
‘You know your stuff, kid. You read a lot?’
‘I read everything. Slim says reading is the greatest escape there is and he’s made some great escapes.’
‘Slim’s a very wise man.’
‘You know Slim?’
‘Everybody knows the Houdini of Boggo Road.’
‘He’s my best friend.’
‘You’re best friends with a convicted killer?’
‘Lyle says Slim didn’t kill that cab driver.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Yes, that’s right. He says Slim was verballed. They stitched him up for it because he had history. They do that, you know, the cops.’
‘Has Slim told you himself that he didn’t do it?’
‘Not really, but Lyle says there’s no way in hell he did it.’
‘And you believe Lyle?’
‘Lyle doesn’t lie.’
‘Everybody lies, kid.’
‘Not Lyle. He’s physically incapable of it. That’s what he told Mum, anyway.’
‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’
‘He called it a full-blown medical condition, “Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder”. It means he can’t mask the truth. He can’t lie.’
‘I don’t think that means he can’t lie. I think it means he can’t be discreet.’
‘Same thing.’
‘Maybe, kid.’
‘I’m sick of adults being discreet. Nobody ever gives you the full story.’
‘Eli?’
‘How do you know my name? Who are you?’
‘Eli?’
‘Yes.’
‘You sure you want the full story?’
There’s the sound of the wardrobe door sliding open. Then August sucks in a deep mouthful of air and I feel Lyle looking through the wardrobe space well before I hear him.
‘What the fuck are you two doing in there?’ he barks.
August drops to the ground and in the dark I can only see flashes of his torchlight frantically making lightning bolt shapes on the walls of this small dank underground earth room as his hands feel desperately for something and he finds it.
‘Don’t you fucking dare,’ Lyle hollers through clenched teeth.
But August does fucking dare. He finds a square brown metal door flap at the base of the right wall, the size of the cardboard base in a large banana box. A bronze latch keeps the flap fixed to a strip of wood in the floor. August loosens the latch, flips the door up and, slipping quickly onto his belly, uses his elbows to crawl through a tunnel running off the room.
I turn to Lyle, stunned.
‘What is this place?’
But I don’t wait for an answer. I drop the phone.
‘Eli!’ screams Lyle.
I dive to my belly and follow August through the tunnel. Soil on my stomach. Damp earth and hard dirt walls against my shoulders, and darkness, save for the shaky torch bouncing white light from August’s hand. I have a friend at school, Duc Quang, who visited his grandparents in Vietnam and when he was there his family visited a tunnel network built by the Viet Cong. He told me how scary it was crawling through those tunnels, the suffocating claustrophobia, the dirt that falls on your face and into your eyes. That’s what this is, goddamn it, full North Vietnamese army madness. Duc Quang said he had to stop halfway through a tunnel, frozen stiff with fear, and two tourists who were crawling behind him had to drag him out of the tunnel backwards. There’s no going back for me. Back in that room is Lyle and, more significantly, Lyle’s open right palm which I have no doubt whatsoever he is priming with a series of finger flexes and muscle clenches in readiness to smack the bounce out of my poor white arse. Fear stopped Duc in his tunnelling tracks, but fear of Lyle keeps me elbow-crawling like a seasoned VC explosives expert – six, seven, eight metres into darkness. The tunnel takes a slight left turn. Nine metres, ten metres, eleven metres. It’s hot in here, effort and sweat and dirt mix into mud on my forehead. The air is thick.
‘Fuck, August, I can’t breathe in here.’
And August stops. His torchlight shines on another brown metal flap. He flips it open and a foul sulphur stench fills the tunnel and makes me gag.
‘What is that smell? Is that shit? I think that’s shit, August.’
August crawls through the tunnel’s exit and I follow him hard and fast, taking a deep breath when I spill into another square space, smaller than the last but just big enough for the two of us to stand up in. The space is dark. The flooring is earth again, but there’s something layering the earth and cushioning my feet. Sawdust. That smell is stronger now.
‘That’s definitely shit, August. Where the fuck are we?’
August looks up and my eyes follow his to a perfect circle of light directly above us, the radius of a dinner plate. Then the circle of light is filled with the face of Lyle looking down at us. Red hair, freckles. Lyle is Ginger Meggs grown up, always in a Jackie Howe cotton singlet and rubber flip-flops, his wiry but muscular arms covered in cheap and ill-conceived tattoos: an eagle with a baby in its talons on his right shoulder; an ageing staff-wielding wizard on his left shoulder who looks like my Year 7 teacher at school, Mr Humphreys; pre-Hawaii Elvis Presley shaking his knees on his left forearm. Mum has a colour picture book about The Beatles and I’ve always thought that Lyle looks a bit like John Lennon in the wide-eyed ‘Please Please Me’ years. I will remember Lyle through ‘Twist and Shout’. Lyle is ‘Love Me Do’. Lyle is ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’.
‘You two are in so much shit,’ Lyle says through the circular hole above us.
‘Why?’ I say defiantly, my confusion turning to anger.
‘No,