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He grips Princess Leia in his left hand. Boy never lets her go. Six weeks ago Slim took August and me to see all three Star Wars movies at the Yatala drive-in. We drank in that faraway galaxy from the back of this LandCruiser, our heads resting on inflated cask wine bags that were themselves resting on an old deadmullet-smelling crab pot that Slim kept in the back near a tackle box and an old kerosene lamp. There were that many stars out that night over south-east Queensland that when the Millennium Falcon flew towards the side of the picture screen I thought for a moment it might just fly on into our own stars, take the light-speed express flight right on down to Sydney.
'You listenin'?' barks Slim.
'Yeah.'
No. Never really listenin' like I should. Always thinkin' too much about August. About Mum. About Lyle. About Slim's Buddy Holly spectacles. About the deep wrinkles in Slim's forehead. About the way he walks funny, ever since he shot himself in the leg in 1952. About the fact he's got a lucky freckle like me.
About how he believed me when I told him my lucky freckle had a power to it, that it meant something to me, that when I'm nervous or scared or lost, my first instinct is to look at that deep brown freckle on the middle knuckle of my right forefinger. Then I feel better. Sounds dumb, Slim, I said. Sounds crazy, Slim, I said. But he showed me his own lucky freckle, almost a mole really, square on the knobby hill of his right wrist bone. He said he thought it might be cancerous but it's his lucky freckle and he couldn't bring himself to cut it out. In D9, he said, that freckle became sacred because it reminded him of a freckle that Irene had high up on her inner left thigh, not far at all from her holiest of holies, and he assured me that one day I too would come to know this rare place on a woman's high inner thigh and I too would know just how Marco Polo felt when he first ran his fingers over silk.
I liked that story, so I told Slim how seeing that freckle on my right forefinger knuckle for the first time at around the age of four, sitting in a yellow shirt with brown sleeves on a long brown vinyl lounge, is as far back as my memory goes. There's a television on in that memory. I look down at my forefinger and I see the freckle and then I look up and turn my head right and I see a face I think belongs to Lyle but it might belong to my father, though I don't really remember my father's face.
So the freckle is always consciousness. My personal big bang. The lounge. The yellow and brown shirt. And I arrive. I am here. I told Slim I thought the rest was questionable, that the four years before that moment might as well never have happened. Slim smiled when I told him that. He said that freckle on my right forefinger knuckle is home.
*
Ignition.
'For fuck's sake, Socrates, what did I just say?' Slim barks.
'Be careful to put your foot down?'
'You were just staring right at me. You looked like you were listenin' but you weren't fuckin' listenin'. Your eyes were wanderin' all over my face, lookin' at this, lookin' at that, but you didn't hear a word.'
That's August's fault. Boy don't talk. Chatty as a thimble, chinwaggy as a cello. He can talk, but he doesn't want to talk. Not a single word that I can recall. Not to me, not to Mum, not to Lyle, not even to Slim. He communicates fine enough, conveys great passages of conversation in a gentle touch of your arm, a laugh, a shake of his head. He can tell you how he's feeling by the way he unscrews a Vegemite jar lid. He can tell you how happy he is by the way he butters bread, how sad he is by the way he ties his shoelaces.
Some days I sit across from him on the lounge and we're playing Super Breakout on the Atari and having so much fun that I look across at him at the precise moment I swear he's going to say something. 'Say it,' I say. 'I know you want to. Just say it.' He smiles, tilts his head to the left and raises his left eyebrow, and his right hand makes an arcing motion, like he's rubbing an invisible snow dome, and that's how he tells me he's sorry. One day, Eli, you will know why I am not speaking. This is not that day, Eli. Now have your fucking go.
From Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton. Copyright © 2019 by Trent Dalton. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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