Boy Swallows Universe

Trent Dalton

• Publisher: The Borough Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780008319281
• eBook ISBN:
  9780008319267
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

*Make sure you read Trent Dalton's irresistible new novel, LOLA IN THE MIRROR, out now*

'Electric' The Times

'Thrilling' New York Times

'Extraordinary' Joanna Cannon

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

A MAJOR NETFLIX SERIES

Australia, 1983

Life is pretty tough right now for twelve-year-old Eli – what with his mute brother, a convicted murderer for a babysitter, a drug-dealing stepfather, an incarcerated mother and a long-lost father – surely it can't get any worse?

Think again. He's about to fall in love, break into prison and cross paths with one of the most notorious criminals Brisbane has ever seen.

A coming-of-age story like no other, Boy Swallows Universe is the most exhilarating novel you'll read all year.

WHAT READERS LOVE ABOUT THIS BOOK:

'Profound, endearing, brutal… this will move you beyond belief and keep you hooked until the very last page' ?????

'Poetic and beautiful, fast-paced and thrilling… One of my all-time favourite books' ?????

'Trent Dalton has captured the humour and tragedy that colours everyday life for kids just getting by. This novel is part true-crime, part hopeless romance, part magical realism and laugh-out-loud funny!' ?????

'One of the best books I've read in years… I promise you won't be disappointed' ?????

Wake. The springs in my bed have snapped and my mattress is so thin that a sprung spring is stabbing through the mattress into my coccyx. I’m leaving here. I must go. Bed is too small. House is too small. World is too big.

Can’t keep sharing a room with my brother, no matter how low cadet wages are at the paper.

After midnight. Moon through the open window. August sleeping in his bed. The rest of the house in darkness. Mum’s bedroom door is open. She sleeps in the library room now there are no more books in it. August got rid of them all in the Bracken Ridge Book Bonanza, which ended up running for six consecutive Saturdays, with August making a disappointing $550 from the whole endeavour. He shifted almost 10,000 books through Bracken Ridge’s Housing Commission sector, but, amid disappointing sales, eventually reached the philosophical plateau that suggested giving the majority of books away for free. It wouldn’t help Mum get back on her feet any quicker but it would increase the chances of Bracken Ridge teens being exposed to Hermann Hesse, John le Carré and The Three Reproductive Phases of Silverfish. Because of my brother, August, there are men down at the Bracken Ridge Tavern on Saturday afternoons now drinking beers over Superforms and betting cards while they discuss the psychological resonance of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

I walk down the hall, still in my boxer shorts and an old black Adidas T-shirt that I’ve been wearing to bed, thin and comfortable and full of holes eaten away by what I believe might be silverfish, who survive on diets of Adidas T-shirts and books by Joseph Conrad.

I pull the fading cream curtain back on our wide front living room window. Open the window right up. Lean out and breathe the night air in deep. Look up at that full moon. Look out at the empty street. I see Lyle back in Darra. He’s standing in that suburban night in his roo-shooting coat smoking a Winfield Red. I miss him. I gave up on him because I was scared. Because I was gutless. Because I was angry at him. Fuck him, right. His fault for hopping in bed with Tytus Broz. Not my fault. Cut him out of my mind along with the Lord of Limbs. Cut them off like the ibis cut its own leg off because the fishing line was killing it.

It’s the moon that pulls my legs outside. My legs are moving and my mind follows. Then my mind follows my hands to the green garden hose looped around the tap fixed to the front of the house. I turn the hose on and kink the hose in my right hand so the water won’t spill through the orange nozzle. I drag the hose to the gutter by the letterbox. I sit and stare up at the moon. The full moon and me and the geometry between us. I release the kink and the water rushes onto the bitumen, pooling quickly in a flat pan in the street. The water runs and the silver moon wobbles in the forming puddle.

‘Can’t sleep?’

I forgot how much he sounds like me. It’s like he’s me and I’m standing behind myself. I look behind me to see August. His face lit by the moon, rubbing his eyes.

‘Yeah,’ I say.

We look into the moon pool.

‘I think I’ve got Dad’s worry gene,’ I say.

‘You don’t have his worry gene,’ he says.

‘I’m going to have to live my life as a recluse,’ I say. ‘I’m never gonna go outside. I’m gonna rent a Housing Commission home just like this one and fill two of the rooms with tinned Black and Gold spaghetti and I’ll eat spaghetti and read books until I die choking in my sleep on a ball of lint from my belly button.’

‘What is for you will not pass you by,’ August says.

I smile at him.

‘You know, I think you might have a baritone in that voice you never use,’ I say.

He laughs.

‘You should try singing some time,’ I say.

‘I think talking’s enough for now,’ he says.

‘I like talking to you, Gus.’

‘I like talking to you, Eli.’

He sits down in the gutter beside me, studies the hose water rushing into the moon pool.

‘What are you worrying about?’ he asks.

‘Everything,’ I say. ‘Everything that’s been and everything that’s about to be.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘It all gets—’

I cut him off. ‘Yeah, it all gets good, Gus, I know. Thanks for reminding me,’ I say.

Our reflections morph and disfigure like monsters in the moon pool.

‘Why do I have this feeling that tomorrow is going to be the most significant day of my life?’ I ponder.

‘Your feelings are well founded,’ August says. ‘It is going to be the most significant day of your life. Every day of your life has been leading up to tomorrow. But of course every day of your life led up to today.’

I look deeper into the moon pool, leaning over my hairy and thin legs.

‘I feel like I have no say in things any more,’ I say. ‘Like nothing I do can change what is and what is going to be. I’m in that car in the dream and we’re crashing through the trees towards that dam and there’s nothing I can do to change our fate. I can’t get out of the car, I can’t stop the car, I just go up and then I go down into the pool. And then all that water comes in.’

August nods at the moon pool.

‘Is that what you see in there?’ August asks.

I shake my head.

‘I don’t see nothin’.’

August looks deeper, too, into the growing moon pool.

‘What do you see?’ I ask.

He stands in his pyjamas. Woolworths cotton ones for summer. White with red stripes, like the nightwear for a member of a barber shop quartet.

‘I can see tomorrow,’ he says.

‘What do you see tomorrow?’ I ask.

‘Everything,’ he says.

‘You care to be a little more specific?’ I say.

He looks at me, puzzled.

‘I mean, it’s awfully convenient for you to maintain your sense of idiotic mystery with all these general comments relating to your bullshit conversations with your multiple selves from multiple dimensions,’ I say. ‘How come they never told you anything useful, these red phone selves of yours? Like, who’s gonna win the Melbourne Cup next year? Gold Lotto numbers next week, maybe? Or, oh, I don’t know, whether or not Tytus Broz is gonna fuckin’ recognise me tomorrow?’

‘Did you speak to the police?’

‘I called them,’ I say. ‘I asked a constable to put me onto the lead investigator. He wouldn’t do that without me giving my name first.’

‘You didn’t give him your name, did you?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I told the constable they need to investigate a man named Iwan Krol in relation to the Penn family. I asked the constable to write that name down. I said, “Are you writing this down?”, and he said he wasn’t because he first wanted to know who I was and why I didn’t want to give him my name and I said I didn’t want to give my name because Iwan Krol is dangerous and so is his boss. And the constable asked who Iwan Krol’s boss is and I said his boss is Tytus Broz and the constable said, “What, the charity guy?”, and I said, “Yeah, the fuckin’ charity guy.” And he said I was crazy and I said I’m not fuckin’ crazy, it’s this fuckin’ State of Queensland that’s fuckin’ crazy and you’re fuckin’ crazy if you don’t listen to me when I tell you that the llama hair the forensic science unit found in the Penns’ house belongs to Iwan Krol who has been running a llama farm on the outskirts of Dayboro for the past two decades.’

‘Then the constable wanted to know how you knew about the llama hair?’

I nod.

‘So I hung up.’

‘No skin off their nose,’ August says.

‘Huh?’

‘What do they care if the criminals of Queensland are slowly picking themselves off?’

‘I think they have to care when one of the people who has gone missing is an eight-year-old boy.’

August shrugs, looks deeper into the moon pool.

‘Bevan Penn,’ I say. ‘They pixelated his face in all the photos but, I swear, Gus, he’s us. He’s you and me.’

‘What do you mean, he’s you and me?’

‘I mean, that coulda been us. I mean, his mum and dad look like Mum and Lyle looked when I was eight years old, you know. And I been thinkin’ how Slim used to talk about cycles and time and things always coming back around again.’

‘They do,’ August says.

‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘maybe they do.’

‘Just like we come back,’ he says.

‘I don’t mean like that.’

I stand up.

‘Stop it, Gus,’ I say.

‘Stop what?’

‘Stop that bullshit about coming back. I’m sick of hearing it.’

‘But you came back, Eli,’ he says. ‘You always come back.’

‘I didn’t come back, Gus,’ I say. ‘I don’t come back. I’m just fuckin’ here in the one dimension. And those voices you heard on the end of the phone were the voices in your head.’

He shakes his head.

‘You heard them,’ he says. ‘You heard them.’

‘Yeah, I heard the voices in my head too,’ I say. ‘The batshit crazy voices in the heads of the Bell brothers. Yeah, Gus, I heard ’em.’

He stares into the moon pool.

‘Do you see her?’ he asks.

‘See who?’

He nods at the water.

‘Caitlyn Spies,’ August says.

‘What about Caitlyn?’ I ask, looking into the moon pool, following his gaze, finding nothing.

‘You should tell Caitlyn Spies.’

‘Tell her what?’

He looks into the pool. He taps the puddle of water with his bare right foot and the moon pool ripples into ten separate stories.

‘Tell her everything,’ he says.

Mum’s voice from the front window of the house. She’s trying to scream and whisper at the same time.

‘What the hell are you two doing out there with that hose?’ she hollers. ‘Get back in bed.’ Her stern warning voice now. ‘If you’re tired for tomorrow …’

Mum’s stern warnings are always open-ended, always leaving the possible consequences of waking up tired for tomorrow as intimidatingly infinite.

If you’re tired for tomorrow … I’ll beat your backsides so red you’ll put Rudolph out of work. If you’re tired for tomorrow … the stars will disappear from the night skies over Bracken Ridge. If you’re tired for tomorrow … the moon will crack like a gobstopper between your teeth and the colours inside the moon will blind humanity. Sleep, Eli. Tomorrow is coming. Everything is coming. All of your life is leading up to tomorrow.

Dad reads The Courier-Mail at the kitchen table at breakfast. He’s smoking a roll-your-own and reading the World Affairs pages. I can read the paper’s front page over my Weet-Bix bowl. It’s an enlarged picture of Glenn Penn’s prison photograph. He’s got a menacing and hard face. Blond hair in a crew cut, bent and misshapen teeth like a row of old garage doors opening halfway. Acne scars. Pale blue eyes. He gives a half-dumb half-smile in the photograph as though that prison photo was a rite of passage to be ticked off his list of dreams, like making it all the way with a pretty girl and making it all the way to Turkey with ten condoms full of heroin in his stomach and up his arse.

The picture’s accompanying story is a co-byline piece by Dave Cullen and Caitlyn Spies about Glenn Penn’s neglected and misspent youth. The usual story: Dad whips Mum with the cord from an electric fry pan; Mum spreads rat poison through Dad’s toasted ham, cheese and tomato sandwich; eight-year-old Glenn Penn burns his local post office down. Dave Cullen holds the top byline but I know Caitlyn wrote this. I know this because there’s a compassion in the piece and it doesn’t feature Dave Cullen’s regular go-to impact phrases ‘shocking revelation’, ‘murderous intent’ and ‘digitally penetrated’. Caitlyn’s interviewed several teachers and parents at Bevan Penn’s primary school. They all say he’s a good kid. A good boy. Quiet. Never hurt a fly. Reads a lot. A library geek. She’s telling the full story about the boy in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt with the face made of pixels.

‘What are you wearing tonight, Eli?’ Mum asks from the living room.

Mum’s ironing clothes with Dad’s old, faulty Sunbeam iron that sends electric shocks through the user on the ‘linen’ setting and leaves black tar marks on my work shirts if I turn it up any higher than the ‘synthetic’ setting.

It’s 8 a.m. – almost ten hours before August is due to accept his award in the Brisbane City Hall Queensland Champions ceremony – and Mum’s already buzzing around the living room the way Mr Bojangles buzzed around a drunk tank.

‘I’m just wearing this,’ I say, nodding down to my untucked plaid deep purple and white work shirt and blue jeans.

Mum is mortified.

‘Your big brother is going to be named a Queensland Champion and you’re gonna front up looking like a child molesterer.’

‘Molester...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Praise for Boy Swallows Universe
• Dedication
• Contents
• Boy Writes Words
• Boy Makes Rainbow
• Boy Follows Footsteps
• Boy Receives Letter
• Boy Kills Bull
• Boy Loses Luck
• Boy Busts Out
• Boy Meets Girl
• Boy Stirs Monster
• Boy Loses Balance
• Boy Seeks Help
• Boy Parts Sea
• Boy Steals Ocean
• Boy Masters Time
• Boy Sees Vision
• Boy Bites Spider
• Boy Tightens Noose
• Boy Digs Deep
• Boy Takes Flight
• Boy Drowns Sea
• Boy Conquers Moon
• Boy Swallows Universe
• Girl Saves Boy
• Keep Reading …
• Acknowledgements
• Trent Dalton on writing Boy Swallows Universe
• About the Author
• About the Publisher