Eli Bell Character Analysis

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 have never happened. Slim smiled when I told him that. He said that freckle on my right forefinger knuckle is home.

Mum’s love came hard. There was pain in it, there was blood and screams and fists against plasterboard walls, because the worst thing Lyle ever did was get my mum on drugs. I guess the best thing Lyle ever did was get her off drugs, but he knows I know that the latter could never make up for the former.

Bich is famous in my town as much for her selfless sponsorship of Darra community events […] as she is for the time she stabbed a Year 5 Darra State School girl, Cheryl Vardy, in the left eye with a steel ruler for teasing Karen Dang about having steamed rice every day for school lunch. Cheryl Vardy needed surgery after the incident. She nearly went blind and Bich Dang didn’t go to prison. That’s when I realized Darra had its own rules and laws and codes and maybe it was ‘Back Off’ Bich Dang who had selflessly drafted them into existence.

“What’s with you and men being good?”

“Never met a good one, that’s all,” he says. “Adult men, Tink. Most fucked-up creatures on the planet. Don’t ever trust ‘em.”

I’ve been thinking lately, Alex, that every problem in the world, every crime ever committed, can be traced back to someone’s dad. Robbery, rape, terrorism […] it all goes back to dads. Mums maybe too, I guess, but there ain’t no shit mum in this world that wasn’t first the daughter of a shit dad. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to, but I’d love to hear about your dad, Alex. Was he good? Was he decent? Was he there?

“Who are we kidding?” I shout. “Watch my language? Watch my language? We’re fucking drug dealers. Drug dealers fucking swear. I’m sick of all these bullshit airs and graces you and Lyle go on with. Do your homework, Eli. Eat your fuckin’ broccoli, Eli. Tidy this kitchen, Eli. Study hard, Eli. Like we’re the fucking Brady Bunch or something’ and not just a dirty bunch of smack pushers. Give me a fucking bre—”

“When I was a kid these streets were clean as a whistle. People gave a shit about these streets. This place was just as pretty as your precious Gap. I tell ya, that’s how it starts, mums and dads in Darra start dropping used nappies in the street, next thing you know they’re lightin’ tyres up outside the Sydney Opera House. That’s how Australia turns to shit, with you just kicking that Solo can into the middle of the street.”

“I reckon widespread suburban heroin use might be a quicker road to ruin,” I suggest.

I don’t know what I expected from drug dealing. More romance, perhaps. A sense of danger and suspense. I realise now that the average street grunt suburban drug dealer is not too far removed from the common pizza delivery boy. Half these deals Lyle and Teddy are making I could make in half the time riding through the south-west Brisbane suburbs on my Mongoose BMX with the gear in my backpack. August could probably do it even faster because he rides faster than me and he’s got a ten-speed Malvern Star racer.

“You can’t stay with me, kid.”

“Why not?”

This is Slim losing patience. It’s not loud what he says but it’s pointed.

“Because you’re not my fucking kid, mate.”

Unplanned. Unwished. Unwilled. Untested. Underdeveloped. Undernourished. Undone. Unwanted. Unloved. Undead. Shoulda coulda woulda never been here in the first place if that creep hadn’t dragged Mum into his car way back in the way back when. If she hadn’t run away from home. If her old man hadn’t run away from her.

“You know what I realised in all that time with my mouth shut?”

“What?”

“Most things people say don’t need to be said,” he says.

He taps the moon pool.

“I’ve been thinking about all the things Lyle said to me,” August says. “He said so many things, and I reckon all those things put together wouldn’t say as much as he said when he’d wrap his arm around my shoulder.”

“What if that’s not enough, kid?” he asks. “Two and a half years is a long time.”

You said it yourself, a lag gets a little bit easier every time you wake up.”

“I didn’t have two kids on the outside,” he says. “Her two and a half years will feel like twenty of mine. That men’s prison is filled with a hundred blokes who think they’re bad to the bone because they’ve done fifteen years. But those blokes don’t love nothin’ and nothin’ loves them back and that makes things easy for ‘em. It’s all those mums across the road who are true hard nuts. They wake each day knowing there’s some lost little shit like you out there waiting to love them back.”

“You asked me that day in the hospital about the good and the bad, Eli,” he says. […] “I should have told you then that it’s nothing but a choice. There’s no past in it, there’s no mums and dads and no where you came froms. It’s just a choice. […]”

“But you didn’t always have a choice,” I say. “When you were a kid. You had no choice then. You had to do what you had to do and then you got on a road that gave you no choice.”

“I always had a choice,” he says.

“Stop tellin’ everybody else’s story and start tellin’ your own for once.”

“Eli said you drove them into the moon pool, Robert.”

And the dream feels so different when she says it like that. You drove them into the moon pool. Nobody else did. It had to be him.

But you heard them, Eli. You heard them on the phone, too.

“I was playing along, Gus,” I say. “I bought into the bullshit because I felt sorry for you being such a nutter.”

I’m sorry, Gus. I’m sorry.

“Well, here’s the reality, Gus,” I say. I point at Dad. “He’s so fuckin’ crazy he tried to drive us into a dam. And you’re just as crazy as him and maybe I’m just as crazy as you.”

[…]

“Did you mean to do it?”

Ultimately, in these embraces, to my surprise, hugging Dad back feels like the good thing to do and my hope is to grow into a good man, so I do it.

August and I wait for her smile because her smile is the sun and the sky and it makes us warm. We smile at her as we rush closer to the phone booth. She has nothing. No bags. No shoes. No purse. But she will still have her smile, that brief celestial event, when her lips open from right to left and she curls her upper lip and she tells us in that smile that we’re not crazy, we are correct about everything, and it’s just the universe that is wrong. And she sees us and she beams that smile and it turns out the universe is right and it’s the smile that is wrong because Mum is missing her two front teeth.

I know, Slim. I know I haven’t asked Dad about the moon pool. I know this happiness depends on me and August and Mum forgetting the bad old days. We lie to ourselves, I know, but isn’t there a little white lie in all acts of forgiveness?

Maybe he didn’t mean to drive us into that dam that night. But maybe he did. Maybe you didn’t kill that taxi driver. But maybe you did.

You did your time for it. You did your time and then some. Maybe Dad has too.

He keeps telling me he’s come back from somewhere. We both have. And he means the moon pool. We’ve come back from the moon pool.

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 the Limbs. Cut them off like the ibis cut off its own leg because the fishing line was killing it.

“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.”

“Yeah, it’s dead,” I say.

“Stupid bird seemed so determined to kill itself,” he says.

Caitlyn slaps her hands.

“Wren!” she says. “I remember now! That’s a wren.”

And with that, the dead blue wren comes back. Like it was just waiting for Caitlyn Spies to recognise it, because, like all living things—like me, me, me—it lives and dies on her breath and her attention.

“I know you’re just the voice in my head,” I say. “You’re a figment of my imagination. I use you to escape from moments of great trauma.”

“Escape?” the man echoes. “What, like Slim over the Boggo Road walls? Escape from yourself, Eli, do ya, like the Houdini of your own mind?”

“773 8173,” I say. “That’s just the number we’d tap into the calculator when we were kids. That’s just ‘Eli Bell’ upside down and back to front.”

“Brilliant!” the man says. “Upside down and back to front, like the universe, hey Eli? You still got the axe?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” the man says. “He’s coming, Eli.”

“I thought they’d look different, your mum and dad,” she says.

I laugh. “You did?”

“They’re so nice,” she says. “They just look like any normal mum and dad.”

“They’ve been working on normal for quite some time now.”

“Just let it ring out, Eli,” she says softly. “What’s he going to tell you”—she puts her other hand behind my head, her perfect and gentle hand sliding down to the back of my neck—“that you don’t already know?”

And the phone rings again as she moves into me and the phone rings again as she closes her eyes and presses her lips against mine and I will remember this moment through the stars I see on the ceiling of this secret room and the spinning planets those stars surround and the dust of a million galaxies scattered across her bottom lip. I will remember this kiss through the big bang. I will remember the end through the beginning.

And the phone stops ringing.

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 have never happened. Slim smiled when I told him that. He said that freckle on my right forefinger knuckle is home.

Mum’s love came hard. There was pain in it, there was blood and screams and fists against plasterboard walls, because the worst thing Lyle ever did was get my mum on drugs. I guess the best thing Lyle ever did was get her off drugs, but he knows I know that the latter could never make up for the former.

Bich is famous in my town as much for her selfless sponsorship of Darra community events […] as she is for the time she stabbed a Year 5 Darra State School girl, Cheryl Vardy, in the left eye with a steel ruler for teasing Karen Dang about having steamed rice every day for school lunch. Cheryl Vardy needed surgery after the incident. She nearly went blind and Bich Dang didn’t go to prison. That’s when I realized Darra had its own rules and laws and codes and maybe it was ‘Back Off’ Bich Dang who had selflessly drafted them into existence.

“What’s with you and men being good?”

“Never met a good one, that’s all,” he says. “Adult men, Tink. Most fucked-up creatures on the planet. Don’t ever trust ‘em.”

I’ve been thinking lately, Alex, that every problem in the world, every crime ever committed, can be traced back to someone’s dad. Robbery, rape, terrorism […] it all goes back to dads. Mums maybe too, I guess, but there ain’t no shit mum in this world that wasn’t first the daughter of a shit dad. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to, but I’d love to hear about your dad, Alex. Was he good? Was he decent? Was he there?

“Who are we kidding?” I shout. “Watch my language? Watch my language? We’re fucking drug dealers. Drug dealers fucking swear. I’m sick of all these bullshit airs and graces you and Lyle go on with. Do your homework, Eli. Eat your fuckin’ broccoli, Eli. Tidy this kitchen, Eli. Study hard, Eli. Like we’re the fucking Brady Bunch or something’ and not just a dirty bunch of smack pushers. Give me a fucking bre—”

“When I was a kid these streets were clean as a whistle. People gave a shit about these streets. This place was just as pretty as your precious Gap. I tell ya, that’s how it starts, mums and dads in Darra start dropping used nappies in the street, next thing you know they’re lightin’ tyres up outside the Sydney Opera House. That’s how Australia turns to shit, with you just kicking that Solo can into the middle of the street.”

“I reckon widespread suburban heroin use might be a quicker road to ruin,” I suggest.

I don’t know what I expected from drug dealing. More romance, perhaps. A sense of danger and suspense. I realise now that the average street grunt suburban drug dealer is not too far removed from the common pizza delivery boy. Half these deals Lyle and Teddy are making I could make in half the time riding through the south-west Brisbane suburbs on my Mongoose BMX with the gear in my backpack. August could probably do it even faster because he rides faster than me and he’s got a ten-speed Malvern Star racer.

“You can’t stay with me, kid.”

“Why not?”

This is Slim losing patience. It’s not loud what he says but it’s pointed.

“Because you’re not my fucking kid, mate.”

Unplanned. Unwished. Unwilled. Untested. Underdeveloped. Undernourished. Undone. Unwanted. Unloved. Undead. Shoulda coulda woulda never been here in the first place if that creep hadn’t dragged Mum into his car way back in the way back when. If she hadn’t run away from home. If her old man hadn’t run away from her.

“You know what I realised in all that time with my mouth shut?”

“What?”

“Most things people say don’t need to be said,” he says.

He taps the moon pool.

“I’ve been thinking about all the things Lyle said to me,” August says. “He said so many things, and I reckon all those things put together wouldn’t say as much as he said when he’d wrap his arm around my shoulder.”

“What if that’s not enough, kid?” he asks. “Two and a half years is a long time.”

You said it yourself, a lag gets a little bit easier every time you wake up.”

“I didn’t have two kids on the outside,” he says. “Her two and a half years will feel like twenty of mine. That men’s prison is filled with a hundred blokes who think they’re bad to the bone because they’ve done fifteen years. But those blokes don’t love nothin’ and nothin’ loves them back and that makes things easy for ‘em. It’s all those mums across the road who are true hard nuts. They wake each day knowing there’s some lost little shit like you out there waiting to love them back.”

“You asked me that day in the hospital about the good and the bad, Eli,” he says. […] “I should have told you then that it’s nothing but a choice. There’s no past in it, there’s no mums and dads and no where you came froms. It’s just a choice. […]”

“But you didn’t always have a choice,” I say. “When you were a kid. You had no choice then. You had to do what you had to do and then you got on a road that gave you no choice.”

“I always had a choice,” he says.

“Stop tellin’ everybody else’s story and start tellin’ your own for once.”

“Eli said you drove them into the moon pool, Robert.”

And the dream feels so different when she says it like that. You drove them into the moon pool. Nobody else did. It had to be him.

But you heard them, Eli. You heard them on the phone, too.

“I was playing along, Gus,” I say. “I bought into the bullshit because I felt sorry for you being such a nutter.”

I’m sorry, Gus. I’m sorry.

“Well, here’s the reality, Gus,” I say. I point at Dad. “He’s so fuckin’ crazy he tried to drive us into a dam. And you’re just as crazy as him and maybe I’m just as crazy as you.”

[…]

“Did you mean to do it?”

Ultimately, in these embraces, to my surprise, hugging Dad back feels like the good thing to do and my hope is to grow into a good man, so I do it.

August and I wait for her smile because her smile is the sun and the sky and it makes us warm. We smile at her as we rush closer to the phone booth. She has nothing. No bags. No shoes. No purse. But she will still have her smile, that brief celestial event, when her lips open from right to left and she curls her upper lip and she tells us in that smile that we’re not crazy, we are correct about everything, and it’s just the universe that is wrong. And she sees us and she beams that smile and it turns out the universe is right and it’s the smile that is wrong because Mum is missing her two front teeth.

I know, Slim. I know I haven’t asked Dad about the moon pool. I know this happiness depends on me and August and Mum forgetting the bad old days. We lie to ourselves, I know, but isn’t there a little white lie in all acts of forgiveness?

Maybe he didn’t mean to drive us into that dam that night. But maybe he did. Maybe you didn’t kill that taxi driver. But maybe you did.

You did your time for it. You did your time and then some. Maybe Dad has too.

He keeps telling me he’s come back from somewhere. We both have. And he means the moon pool. We’ve come back from the moon pool.

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 the Limbs. Cut them off like the ibis cut off its own leg because the fishing line was killing it.

“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.”

“Yeah, it’s dead,” I say.

“Stupid bird seemed so determined to kill itself,” he says.

Caitlyn slaps her hands.

“Wren!” she says. “I remember now! That’s a wren.”

And with that, the dead blue wren comes back. Like it was just waiting for Caitlyn Spies to recognise it, because, like all living things—like me, me, me—it lives and dies on her breath and her attention.

“I know you’re just the voice in my head,” I say. “You’re a figment of my imagination. I use you to escape from moments of great trauma.”

“Escape?” the man echoes. “What, like Slim over the Boggo Road walls? Escape from yourself, Eli, do ya, like the Houdini of your own mind?”

“773 8173,” I say. “That’s just the number we’d tap into the calculator when we were kids. That’s just ‘Eli Bell’ upside down and back to front.”

“Brilliant!” the man says. “Upside down and back to front, like the universe, hey Eli? You still got the axe?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” the man says. “He’s coming, Eli.”

“I thought they’d look different, your mum and dad,” she says.

I laugh. “You did?”

“They’re so nice,” she says. “They just look like any normal mum and dad.”

“They’ve been working on normal for quite some time now.”

“Just let it ring out, Eli,” she says softly. “What’s he going to tell you”—she puts her other hand behind my head, her perfect and gentle hand sliding down to the back of my neck—“that you don’t already know?”

And the phone rings again as she moves into me and the phone rings again as she closes her eyes and presses her lips against mine and I will remember this moment through the stars I see on the ceiling of this secret room and the spinning planets those stars surround and the dust of a million galaxies scattered across her bottom lip. I will remember this kiss through the big bang. I will remember the end through the beginning.

And the phone stops ringing.