Excerpt from Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Slim says I have an adult mind in a child's body. I'm only

twelve years old but Slim reckons I can take the hard stories. Slim reckons I should hear all the prison stories of male rape and men who broke their necks on knotted bedsheets and swallowed sharp pieces of metal designed to tear through their insides and guarantee themselves a week-long vacation in the sunny Royal Brisbane Hospital. I think he goes too far sometimes with the details, blood spitting from raped arseholes and the like. 'Light and shade, kid,' Slim says. 'No escaping the light and no escaping the shade.' I need to hear the stories about disease and death inside so I can understand the impact of those memories of Irene. Slim says I can take the hard stories because the age of my body matters nothing compared to the age of my soul, which he has gradually narrowed down to somewhere between the early seventies and dementia. Some months ago, sitting in this very car, Slim said he would gladly share a prison cell with me because I listen and I remember what I listen to. A single tear rolled down my face when he paid me this great roommate honour.

'Tears don't go so well inside,' he said.

I didn't know if he meant inside a prison cell or inside one's body. Half out of pride I cried, half out of shame, because I'm not worthy, if worthy's a word for a bloke to share a lag with.

'Sorry,' I said, apologising for the tear. He shrugged.

'There's more where that came from,' he said.

Your end is a dead blue wren. Your end is a dead blue wren.

*

I will remember the rainbow of old dirt wiped across Slim's windscreen through the shape of the milky moon rising into my left thumbnail, and forever more when I look into that milky moon I will remember the day Arthur 'Slim' Halliday, the greatest prison escapee who ever lived, the wondrous and elusive 'Houdini of Boggo Road', taught me – Eli Bell, the boy with the old soul and the adult mind, prime prison cellmate candidate, the boy with his tears on the outside – to drive his rusted dark blue Toyota LandCruiser.

Thirty-two years ago, in February 1953, after a six-day trial in the Brisbane Supreme Court, a man named Judge Edwin James Droughton Stanley sentenced Slim to life for brutally bashing a taxi driver named Athol McCowan to death with a .45 Colt pistol. The papers have always called Slim 'the Taxi Driver Killer'.

I just call him my babysitter.

'Clutch,' he says.

Slim's left thigh tenses as his old sun-brown leg, wrinkled with seven hundred and fifty life lines because he might be seven hundred and fifty years old, pushes the clutch in. Slim's old sun-brown left hand shifts the gear stick. A hand-rolled cigarette burning to yellow, grey and then black, hanging precariously to the spit on the corner of his bottom lip.

'Noootral.'

I can see my brother, August, through the crack in the wind- screen. He sits on our brown brick fence writing his life story in fluid cursive with his right forefinger, etching words into thin air.

Boy writes on air.

Boy writes on air the way my old neighbour Gene Crimmins says Mozart played piano, like every word was meant to arrive, parcel packed and shipped from a place beyond his own busy mind. Not on paper and writing pad or typewriter, but thin air, the invisible stuff, that great act-of-faith stuff that you might not even know existed did it not sometimes bend into wind and blow against your face. Notes, reflections, diary entries, all written on thin air, with his extended right forefinger swishing and slashing, writing letters and sentences into nothingness, as though he has to get it all out of his head but he needs the story to vanish into space as well, forever dipping his finger into his eternal glass well of invisible ink. Words don't go so well inside. Always better out than in.

From Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton. Copyright © 2019 by Trent Dalton. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.