lies, kid.’
‘Not Lyle. He’s physically incapable of it. That’s what he told Mum, anyway.’
‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’
‘He called it a full-blown medical condition, “Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder”. It means he can’t mask the truth. He can’t lie.’
‘I don’t think that means he can’t lie. I think it means he can’t be discreet.’
‘Same thing.’
‘Maybe, kid.’
‘I’m sick of adults being discreet. Nobody ever gives you the full story.’
‘Eli?’
‘How do you know my name? Who are you?’
‘Eli?’
‘Yes.’
‘You sure you want the full story?’
There’s the sound of the wardrobe door sliding open. Then August sucks in a deep mouthful of air and I feel Lyle looking through the wardrobe space well before I hear him.
‘What the fuck are you two doing in there?’ he barks.
August drops to the ground and in the dark I can only see flashes of his torchlight frantically making lightning bolt shapes on the walls of this small dank underground earth room as his hands feel desperately for something and he finds it.
‘Don’t you fucking dare,’ Lyle hollers through clenched teeth.
But August does fucking dare. He finds a square brown metal door flap at the base of the right wall, the size of the cardboard base in a large banana box. A bronze latch keeps the flap fixed to a strip of wood in the floor. August loosens the latch, flips the door up and, slipping quickly onto his belly, uses his elbows to crawl through a tunnel running off the room.
I turn to Lyle, stunned.
‘What is this place?’
But I don’t wait for an answer. I drop the phone.
‘Eli!’ screams Lyle.
I dive to my belly and follow August through the tunnel. Soil on my stomach. Damp earth and hard dirt walls against my shoulders, and darkness, save for the shaky torch bouncing white light from August’s hand. I have a friend at school, Duc Quang, who visited his grandparents in Vietnam and when he was there his family visited a tunnel network built by the Viet Cong. He told me how scary it was crawling through those tunnels, the suffocating claustrophobia, the dirt that falls on your face and into your eyes. That’s what this is, goddamn it, full North Vietnamese army madness. Duc Quang said he had to stop halfway through a tunnel, frozen stiff with fear, and two tourists who were crawling behind him had to drag him out of the tunnel backwards. There’s no going back for me. Back in that room is Lyle and, more significantly, Lyle’s open right palm which I have no doubt whatsoever he is priming with a series of finger flexes and muscle clenches in readiness to smack the bounce out of my poor white arse. Fear stopped Duc in his tunnelling tracks, but fear of Lyle keeps me elbow-crawling like a seasoned VC explosives expert – six, seven, eight metres into darkness. The tunnel takes a slight left turn. Nine metres, ten metres, eleven metres. It’s hot in here, effort and sweat and dirt mix into mud on my forehead. The air is thick.
‘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
