Trauma, Coping, and Healing Theme 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.

“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—”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.