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Boy Swallows Universe
Trent Dalton
‘The most extraordinary writer –a rare talent' Nikki GemmellAn utterly wonderful novel of love, crime, magic, fate and coming of age from one of Australia's most exciting new writers.Brisbane, 1983: A lost father, a mute brother, a mum in jail, a heroin dealer for a stepfather and a notorious criminal for a babysitter. It's not as if Eli's life isn't complicated enough already. He's just trying to follow his heart, learning what it takes to be a good man, but life just keeps throwing obstacles in the way – not least of which is Tytus Broz, legendary drug dealer.But Eli's life is about to get a whole lot more serious. He's about to fall in love. And he has to break into prison on Christmas Day, to save his mum.A story of brotherhood, true love and the most unlikely of friendships, Boy Swallows Universe will be the most heartbreaking, joyous and exhilarating novel you will read all year.
Copyright
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Trent Dalton 2018
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover photograph © Margie Hurwich/plainpicture
Author photo by Lyndon Mechielsen
Trent Dalton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008319250
Ebook Edition © JULY 2018 ISBN: 9780008319267
Version: 2018-11-26
Praise for Boy Swallows Universe
‘An astonishing achievement. Dalton is a breath of fresh air – raw, honest, funny, moving. He has created a novel of the most surprising and addictive nature. Unputdownable’
David Wenham
‘I couldn’t stop reading from the moment I started, and I still can barely speak for the beauty of it. Trent Dalton has done something very special here, writing with grace, from his own broken heart’
Caroline Overington, author of The One Who Got Away
‘This novel is a raucous, moving, hilarious triumph – a major new voice on the Australian literary scene has arrived’
Nikki Gemmell, author of The Bride Stripped Bare and After
‘Enthralling – a moving account of sibling solidarity and the dogged pursuit of love’
Geoffrey Robertson QC
‘Stunning. My favourite novel for decades. Left me devastated but looking to the heavens’
Tim Rogers, author of Detours
‘Oh my God. Wow. It’s just superb. I’ve always looked out for Trent’s work because he has a magic about him: what he sees, how he explains things. He can describe a kitchen table in a way that makes you want to throw your arms around it. After reading Boy Swallows Universe, I realise that his genius isn’t really just about writing so much; it’s about hope, and his instinctive and infectious “Yes” to one of the most plaguing questions of the human night: can tenderness survive brutality? This novel confirms Trent Dalton as a genuine treasure of Australian letters’
Annabel Crabb
‘As a brilliant journalist, Trent Dalton has always intimately understood how fact is often stranger than fiction. Perhaps it took someone like him to produce a novel so humming with truth. Call it a hunch, but I think he might’ve just written an Australian classic’
Benjamin Law
Dedication
For Mum and Dad.
For Joel, Ben and Jesse.
Contents
1 Cover (#u26078942-5c69-559b-8c84-351f6e599203)
2 Title Page (#uccf97813-5ace-548f-b9f1-a5f7f4fe0ab7)
3 Copyright (#ulink_ca61571e-ee70-532e-a1d5-e9d62969804f)
4 Praise (#u6f8f5581-0e27-5771-b9e9-3b9b233feaee)
5 Dedication (#ulink_433aaaa7-e485-5a96-9c27-23a9d8361350)
6 Contents (#ub9c4bf6a-df5e-58af-b78e-21a5d04a43cf)
7 Boy Writes Words (#ulink_743d8284-802a-5e76-8f2e-0238fa6184a0)
8 Boy Makes Rainbow (#ulink_f02afc91-0a0b-57a4-b225-f3eb8098e2c3)
9 Boy Follows Footsteps (#ulink_dddc0a0e-e159-55f6-9e75-05922da24d52)
10 Boy Receives Letter
11 Boy Kills Bull
12 Boy Loses Luck
13 Boy Busts Out
14 Boy Meets Girl
15 Boy Stirs Monster
16 Boy Loses Balance
17 Boy Seeks Help
18 Boy Parts Sea
19 Boy Steals Ocean
20 Boy Masters Time
21 Boy Sees Vision
22 Boy Bites Spider
23 Boy Tightens Noose
24 Boy Digs Deep
25 Boy Takes Flight
26 Boy Drowns Sea
27 Boy Conquers Moon
28 Boy Swallows Universe
29 Girl Saves Boy
30 Acknowledgements
31 About the Author
32 About the Publisher (#u23eeb14d-6392-55da-ac3a-094bb97333d2)
GuideCover (#u26078942-5c69-559b-8c84-351f6e599203)Contents (#ub9c4bf6a-df5e-58af-b78e-21a5d04a43cf)Chapter 1 (#uc9af1b67-05c1-56a4-ae93-8e90149da8a5)
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Boy Writes Words
Your end is a dead blue wren.
‘Did you see that, Slim?’
‘See what?’
‘Nothing.’
Your end is a dead blue wren. No doubt about it. Your. End. No doubt about it. Is. A. Dead. Blue. Wren.
*
The crack in Slim’s windscreen looks like a tall and armless stickman bowing to royalty. The crack in Slim’s windscreen looks like Slim. His windscreen wipers have smeared a rainbow of old dirt over to my passenger side. Slim says a good way for me to remember the small details of my life is to associate moments and visions with things on my person or things in my regular waking life that I see and smell and touch often. Body things, bedroom things, kitchen things. This way I will have two reminders of any given detail for the price of one.
That’s how Slim beat Black Peter. That’s how Slim survived the hole. Everything had two meanings, one for here, here being where he was then, cell D9, 2 Division, Boggo Road Gaol, and another for there, that boundless and unlocked universe expanding in his head and his heart. Nothing in the here but four green concrete walls and darkness upon darkness and his lone and stationary body. An angle iron and steel mesh bed welded to a wall. A toothbrush and a pair of cloth prison slippers. But a cup of old milk slid through a cell door slot by a silent screw took him there, to Ferny Grove in the 1930s, the lanky young farmhand milking cows on the outskirts of Brisbane. A forearm scar became a portal to a boyhood bike ride. A shoulder sunspot was a wormhole to the beaches of the Sunshine Coast. One rub and he was gone. An escaped prisoner here in D9. Pretend free but never on the run, which was as good as how he’d been before they threw him in the hole, real free but always on the run.
He’d thumb the peaks and valleys of his knuckles and they would take him there, to the hills of the Gold Coast hinterland, take him all the way to Springbrook Falls, and the cold steel prison bed frame of cell D9 would become a water-worn limestone rock, and the prison hole’s cold concrete floor beneath his bare feet summer-warm water to dip his toes into, and he would touch his cracked lips and remember how it felt when something as soft and as perfect as Irene’s lips reached his, how she took all his sins and all his pain away with her quenching kiss, washed him clean like Springbrook Falls washed him clean with all that white water bucketing on his head.
I’m more than a little concerned that Slim’s prison fantasies are becoming mine. Irene resting on that wet and mossy emerald boulder, naked and blonde, giggling like Marilyn Monroe, head back and loose and powerful, master of any man’s universe, keeper of dreams, a vision there to stick around for here, to let the anytime blade of a smuggled shiv wait another day.
‘I had an adult mind,’ Slim always says. That’s how he beat Black Peter, Boggo Road’s underground isolation cell. They threw him in that medieval box for fourteen days during a Queensland summer heatwave. They gave him half a loaf of bread to eat across two weeks. They gave him four, maybe five cups of water.
Slim says half of his Boggo Road prison mates would have died after a week in Black Peter because half of any prison population, and any major city of the world for that matter, is filled with adult men with child minds. But an adult mind can take an adult man anywhere he wants to go.
Black Peter had a scratchy coconut fibre mat that he slept on, the size of a doormat, or the length of one of Slim’s long shinbones. Every day, Slim says, he lay on his side on the coir mat and pulled those long shinbones into his chest and closed his eyes and opened the door to Irene’s bedroom and he slipped under Irene’s white bedsheet and he spooned his body gently against hers and he wrapped his right arm around Irene’s naked porcelain belly and there he stayed for fourteen days. ‘Curled up like a bear and hibernated,’ he says. ‘Got so cosy down there in hell I never wanted to climb back up.’
Slim says I have an adult mind in a child’s body. I’m only twelve years old but Slim reckons I can take the hard stories. Slim reckons I should hear all the prison stories of male rape and men who broke their necks on knotted bedsheets and swallowed sharp pieces of metal designed to tear through their insides and guarantee themselves a week-long vacation in the sunny Royal Brisbane Hospital. I think he goes too far sometimes with the details, blood spitting from raped arseholes and the like. ‘Light and shade, kid,’ Slim says. ‘No escaping the light and no escaping the shade.’ I need to hear the stories about disease and death inside so I can understand the impact of those memories of Irene. Slim says I can take the hard stories because the age of my body matters nothing compared to the age of my soul, which he has gradually narrowed down to somewhere between the early seventies and dementia. Some months ago, sitting in this very car, Slim said he would gladly share a prison cell with me because I listen and I remember what I listen to. A single tear rolled down my face when he paid me this great roommate honour.
‘Tears don’t go so well inside,’ he said.
I didn’t know if he meant inside a prison cell or inside one’s body. Half out of pride I cried, half out of shame, because I’m not worthy, if worthy’s a word for a bloke to share a lag with.
‘Sorry,’ I said, apologising for the tear. He shrugged.
‘There’s more where that came from,’ he said.
Your end is a dead blue wren. Your end is a dead blue wren.
*
I will remember the rainbow of old dirt wiped across Slim’s windscreen through the shape of the milky moon rising into my left thumbnail, and forever more when I look into that milky moon I will remember the day Arthur ‘Slim’ Halliday, the greatest prison escapee who ever lived, the wondrous and elusive ‘Houdini of Boggo Road’, taught me – Eli Bell, the boy with the old soul and the adult mind, prime prison cellmate candidate, the boy with his tears on the outside – to drive his rusted dark blue Toyota LandCruiser.
Thirty-two years ago, in February 1953, after a six-day trial in the Brisbane Supreme Court, a man named Judge Edwin James Droughton Stanley sentenced Slim to life for brutally bashing a taxi driver named Athol McCowan to death with a .45 Colt pistol. The papers have always called Slim ‘the Taxi Driver Killer’.
I just call him my babysitter.
‘Clutch,’ he says.
Slim’s left thigh tenses as his old sun-brown leg, wrinkled with seven hundred and fifty life lines because he might be seven hundred and fifty years old, pushes the clutch in. Slim’s old sun-brown left hand shifts the gearstick. A hand-rolled cigarette burning to yellow, grey and then black, hanging precariously to the spit on the corner of his bottom lip.
‘Noootral.’
