Boy Swallows Universe. Trent Dalton. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Trent Dalton
Издательство: HarperCollins
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Современная зарубежная литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780008319267
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shrugs. He grips a flashlight in his right hand, passes Lena’s bed.

      ‘This bed makes me sad.’

      August nods knowingly. It makes me sadder, Eli. Everything makes me sadder. My emotions run deeper than yours, Eli, don’t forget it.

      The bed sags on one side, weighed down on one half for the eight years that Lena Orlik slept alone on it without the balancing weight of her husband, Aureli Orlik, who died of prostate cancer on this bed in 1968.

      Aureli died quiet. Died as quiet as this room.

      ‘Reckon Lena’s watching us right now?’

      August smiles, shrugs his shoulders. Lena believed in God but she didn’t believe in love, or at least the kind written in stars. Lena didn’t believe in fate because if her love of Aureli was meant to be then the birth and the whole unholy and deranged headfuck adulthood of Adolf Hitler was also meant to be because that monster, ‘that filthy potwor’, was the only reason they met in 1945 in an American-run displaced persons holding camp in Germany where they stayed for four years, long enough for Aureli to collect the silver that formed Lena’s wedding ring. Lyle was born in the camp in 1949, spent his first night on earth sleeping in a large iron wash bucket, wrapped in a grey blanket like the one right here on this bed. America wouldn’t take Lyle and Great Britain wouldn’t take Lyle, but Australia would and Lyle never forgot this fact, which is why, during a wildly misspent youth, he never burned or vandalised property marked Made in Australia.

      Aureli built this room himself, built the whole house on weekends with Polish friends from the railway line. No electricity for the first two years. Lena and Aureli taught themselves English by kerosene lamp light. The house spread, room by nailed room, short stump by short stump, until the smell of Lena’s Polish wild mushroom soup and potato and cheese pierogi and cabbage golabki and roasted lamb baranina filled three bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, a lounge room, a laundry off the kitchen, a bathroom and a stand-alone flushable toilet beneath a wall hanging of Warsaw’s white three-nave Church of the Holiest Saviour.

      August stops, turns to the room’s built-in wardrobe. Lyle built this wardrobe himself using all those woodcraft skills he learned watching his dad and his dad’s Polish friends piece this house together.

      ‘What is it, Gus?’

      August nods his head right. You should open the wardrobe door.

      I open the wardrobe. An old ironing board standing up. A bag of Lena’s old clothes on the wardrobe floor. A hanging row of Lena’s dresses, in single colours: olive, tan, black, blue.

      Lena died loud, a violent cacophony of crashing steel and a Frankie Valli high note, returning from Toowoomba’s Carnival of Flowers along the Warrego Highway at twilight, eighty minutes out of Brisbane, her Ford Cortina meeting the front steel grille of a semitrailer hauling pineapples. Lyle was down south in a Kings Cross drug rehab with his old girlfriend, Astrid, on the second of three attempts to kick a decade-long heroin habit. He was jonesing all the way through a subsequent meeting with police officers from the highway town of Gatton who attended the scene. ‘She wouldn’t have suffered,’ said a senior officer, which Lyle took as the officer’s tender way of saying, ‘The truck was fuckin’ huuuuge.’ The officer handed over the only possessions of Lena’s they were able to prise from the Cortina’s wreckage: Lena’s handbag, a set of rosary beads, a small round pillow that she sat on to see better above the steering wheel and, miraculously, a cassette tape recording ejected from the car’s modest stereo system, Lookin’ Back by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons.

      ‘Fuck,’ Lyle said, holding the tape, shaking his head.

      ‘What?’ said the officer.

      True love comes hard.

      *

      ‘What is it, Gus?’

      He puts a forefinger to his lips. He silently shifts aside the bag of Lena’s clothes, slides Lena’s dresses across the wardrobe’s hanging pole. He pushes against the rear wall of the wardrobe space and a sheet of white painted timber, a metre by a metre, clicks against a compression mechanism behind the wall and falls forward into August’s hands.

      ‘What are you doing, Gus?’

      He slides the timber sheet along the back of Lena’s hanging dresses.

      A black void opens behind the wardrobe, a chasm, a space of unknown distance beyond the wall. August’s eyes are wide, elated by the hope and possibility in the void.

      ‘What is that?’

      *

      ‘You must feel special,’ she said.

      ‘For what?’ Mum asked.

      ‘Spirit chose you to watch over him,’ she said, nodding at August.

      Spirit, we would later discover, was an all-encompassing term for the creator of all living things who visited Astrid on occasion in three manifestations: a mystical white-robed goddess spirit, Sharna; an Egyptian Pharaoh named Om Ra; and Errol, a farting, foul-mouthed representation of all the universe’s ills, who spoke like a small drunk Irishman. Lucky for us, Spirit liked August