‘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, I mean you’re actually standing in shit,’ he says. ‘You just crawled inside the thunderbox.’
Fuck. The thunderbox. The abandoned rusty tin outhouse at the end of Lena’s backyard, cobwebbed home to redback spiders and brown snakes so hungry they even bite your arse in your dreams. Perspective’s a funny thing. The world seems so different looking up at it from six feet under. Life from the bottom of a shithole. The only way is up from here for August and Eli Bell.
Lyle removes the thick sheet of wood with the hole in it that stretches across the thunderbox and acts as the toilet seat that once cushioned the plump backsides of Lena and Aureli and every one of Aureli’s workmates who helped build the house we just miraculously crawled away from through a secret underground tunnel.
Lyle reaches his right arm down into the void, hand extended for grabbing.
‘C’mon,’ he says.
I move back from his hand.
‘No, you’re gonna give us a floggin’,’ I say.
‘Well, I can’t lie,’ he says.
‘Fuck this.’
‘Don’t fuckin’ swear, Eli,’ Lyle says.
‘I’m not going anywhere until you give us some answers,’ I bark.
‘Don’t test me, Eli.’
‘You and Mum are using again.’
Got him. He drops his head, shakes it. He’s tender now, compassionate and regretful.
‘We’re not using, mate,’ he says. ‘I promised you both. I don’t break my promises.’
‘Who was the guy on the red phone?’ I shout.
‘What guy?’ Lyle asks. ‘What the hell are you talking about, Eli?’
‘The phone rang and August picked it up.’
‘Eli …’
‘The man,’ I say. ‘Deep voice. He’s your drug boss isn’t he? He’s the man who gave you the bag of heroin I found in the mower catcher.’
‘Eli …’
‘He’s the big bad mastermind, the puppet master behind it all, the kingpin who sounds all sweet and nice and boring like a high school Science teacher but is actually a murderous megalomaniac.’
‘Eli, damn it!’ he screams.
I stop. Lyle shakes his head. He takes a breath.
‘That phone doesn’t get calls,’ he says. ‘Your imagination’s getting the better of you again, Eli.’
I turn to August. I turn back up to Lyle.
‘It rang, Lyle. August picked it up. A man was on the other end. He knew my name. He knew us all. He knew Slim. I thought for a minute it was you but then …’
‘That’s enough, Eli,’ Lyle barks. ‘Whose idea was it to go into Lena’s room?’
August puts a thumb to his chest. Lyle nods his head.
‘All right, here’s the deal,’ he says. ‘Come up now and get what’s coming to you, and after everyone’s settled down a bit I’ll update you on a few things we got goin’ on.’
‘Fuck that,’ I say. ‘I want answers now.’
Lyle replaces the wood toilet seat back on the thunderbox.
‘Let me know when you find your manners again, Eli,’ he says.
Lyle walks away.
Four years ago I thought he was going to walk away forever. He stood at the front door with a duffle bag over his right shoulder. I clutched his left hand and leaned back on it with all my weight and he dragged me with him out the door.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, Lyle.’
Tears in my eyes and tears in my nose and mouth.
‘I gotta get myself better, mate,’ he said. ‘August is gonna look after your mum for me. And you gotta look after August, all right.’
‘No,’ I howled and he turned his head and I thought I had him because he never cries but his eyes were wet. ‘No.’
Then he shouted at me: ‘Let me go, Eli.’ And he pushed me back through the door and I fell to the linoleum floor of the front sunroom, friction taking skin from my elbows.
‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back.’
‘You’re lying,’ I shouted.
‘I can’t lie, Eli.’
Then he walked out the front door and out along the path to the front gate and out further past the wrought-iron letterbox and the brown brick fence with the single missing brick. I followed him all the way out to the gate and I was screaming so loud it hurt my throat. ‘You’re a liar,’ I screamed. ‘You’re a liar. You’re a liar. You’re a liar.’ But he didn’t even turn around. He just kept walking away.
But then he came back. Six months later. It was January and it was hot and I was in the front yard, shirtless and tanned, with my thumb on the garden hose directing arcing sheets of vapour spray to the sun to make my own rainbows and I saw him walking through the wall of water. He opened the front gate and closed it behind him and I dropped the hose and ran to him. He had navy blue work pants on and a navy blue denim work shirt covered in grease. He was fit and strong and when he kneeled on the pathway to meet my height I thought he kneeled like King Arthur and I had never loved another man more in my short life.