Boy Swallows Universe

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‘Gr . . .’ she said.

She closed her eyes, like she was faint. August and I watched and waited for some sign she was back, some sign that she was awake from the big sleep, and I guess that sign was the way she fell into Lyle’s arm and then collapsed onto the floor, clinging to the man who might have saved her life, and waving in the boys who believed he could do it. We huddled around her and she was like a fallen bird.

And in the cave of our bodies she chirped two words.

‘Group hug,’ she whispered. And we hugged her so tight we might have all formed into rock if we’d stuck around long enough. Formed into diamond.

Then she staggered, clinging to Lyle, to their bedroom. Lyle closed the bedroom door behind them. Silence. August and I immediately stepped softly into Lena’s room like we were treading lightly into a minefield in one of those North Vietnamese jungles of Duc Quang’s grandparents’ homeland.

There were scattered paper plates and food scraps across the floor amid clumps of hair. There was a bedpan in the corner of the room. The room’s sky-blue walls were covered in small holes the size of Mum’s fists and emanating from these holes were streaks of blood that looked like tattered red flags blowing in battlefield winds. A long brown streak of dried-up shit wound like a dirt road to nowhere along two walls. And whatever the battle was that Mum had been waging in that small bedroom, we knew she had just won it.

My mum’s name is Frances Bell.

*

August and I stand in silence in the hole. A full minute passes. August pushes me hard in the chest in frustration.

‘Sorry,’ I say.

Another two minutes pass in silence.

‘Thanks for taking the hit on whose idea it was.’

August shrugs. Another two minutes pass and the smell and the heat in this shithole grip my neck and my nose and my knowing.

We stare up to the circle of light, up through Lena and Aureli Orlik’s backyard wooden arse void.

‘Do you think he’s coming back?’