They’ve promised a cool change but it hasn’t come yet or, if it has, it hasn’t reached its way up to the top floor of the nursing home. Down below, there’s a passenger liner leaving Station Pier and it sounds its departure like the final note of a sappy song.
I put down a yellow ‘Draw 2’ card on the pile and wait for Brett to react. A sudden gust of wind, still warm and heavy, lifts the terylene curtain and sucks it back flat against the flyscreen. Brett pulls his red-and-white Sydney Swans beanie down over his ears and scratches the side of his nose. I take two cards from the top of the pile and slide them into the twenty or so already gripped tight in his hand. The passenger liner is manoeuvring away from the dock and it sounds its siren again, as if to say—It’s been great, sweetheart, I really have to go.
‘Aren’t you hot with that beanie on, Brett?’ I ask.
Brett keeps his eyes on his cards and they bend in the middle with the pressure of his fingers. ‘I don’t understand this game we’re playing, Tim,’ he says.
* * *
It’s the first time I’ve seen my brother in a year and I’m sitting here sipping on a cup of tea that tastes like it’s been brewing for days and trying to let him beat me at Uno. And Brett looks like it makes no difference to him at all if I’m here or not. It’s true he has nowhere better to be. Nowhere else he can go, in any case.
He’s seven years older than me, but he looks way younger. Despite all the drugs he’s put through his system and what he went through on the streets, the bastard still looks better than me. He’ll outlive the lot of us probably. At least if he does I won’t be around to have to give the eulogy at his funeral and work out what to say about him and what he did with his fucked-up life.
I imagine Mum and my older sister Kay have done their fair share of thinking about what could have helped and maybe blaming themselves, or maybe not. I don’t know. I have no idea what Brett thought while he was doing all the shit he did, or if he just let things happen without much thinking. Not that he has the wherewithal to think about it now, but I reckon it was Dad’s death that was probably the start of things coming undone for him.
I was pretty young and my memories of that time are sketchy. I remember Brett picking me up from school in grade one on his way back from high school. He was tall and thicker in his limbs than most of the other boys that age and he would always be wearing shorts, even on freezing cold days, and bouncing a footy. All he’d say was, ‘How was your day?’ and I’d say, ‘Good,’ and we’d walk the rest of the way home in silence. I watched the way the ball speared down and back into his hands every time and his eyes weren’t even watching it, just pointing relaxed out in front of him along the street, and I remember the sound of the leather ringing under the concrete footpath.
I know from Kay that Dad used to do heaps of sporty stuff with Brett—footy and dirt bikes and surfing—and after he died, Brett had to give that all up. Mum wasn’t going to do it with him and there weren’t any uncles to step in and fill the hole left by Dad. And there was so much going on with Mum and having to sort out the financial stuff that Brett not having anyone to take him to footy was the least of everyone’s worries.
He was thirteen and, looking back, that’s a pretty crucial time for a boy. You don’t really think about it as much as you do for girls, but it’s the start of laying down the foundations for becoming a man, really. So from then to about sixteen, when he left school, it was a pretty messy time as I recall: getting into strife with teachers, drinking, being the tough guy, bashing kids up. And then he started hanging round with this guy called Frog and that’s when he started getting into trouble with the cops. Stealing, getting wasted, crashing his motorbike. Mum used to get calls at all hours of the night to go pick him up from hospital or from the police station.
And then somehow he got the money to go overseas for a few years. No one really knew what his plans were. I was still pretty young, just starting high school. We didn’t go out to the airport to see him off, but we had a family dinner the night before. Kay and her fiancé came and Mum made a fancy trifle and after we finished eating it, she pulled out a wrapped-up present and handed it to Brett. It was Dad’s old Swiss Army knife, for opening cans and cutting his nails, she said. Brett gave Mum a kiss on the cheek and said he would take good care of it. Then he punched me in the arm and said, ‘You be good, kid,’ and he promised to bring me back a souvenir from somewhere.
We got a couple of funny postcards from him in the first few months. One was from London, with punks with blue mohawks, and one was from Mexico, with Mickey Mouse in a sombrero. Then after that he only wrote about once every six months or called reverse charges once in a while to tell us he was in Germany or Morocco or Bangladesh. For Christmas one year he posted me a t-shirt from Amsterdam that said Have a Nice Trip with a picture of a marijuana leaf on it. Mum wasn’t all that thrilled and told me I couldn’t wear it to school on free dress days.
When he came back to Australia, he went up north and we hardly heard from him till he was in his late twenties. I’d moved out by the time Brett came back to Melbourne and moved into Mum’s house, but out the back in a caravan. Whenever I came round to Mum’s to visit, I’d hardly see him. He’d come inside to get a beer out of the fridge or something and Mum’d yell out, ‘Brett! Tim’s here,’ and he’d stick his head round the corner and say, ‘G’day,’ and that was about it.
It was eighteen months ago that it all came unstuck in a big way. He’d been into drugs for a while and not working and still living out the back at Mum’s. He was getting more and more abusive with her. Not physically but really bad verbally, ranting and swearing. Completely off his head. You turned the corner at the top of the street and you heard it from a hundred metres away. Just this stream of abuse.
But this one evening it got so bad that Mum called me and said, ‘Brett’s not good. I’ve had to lock him out.’ I came round with my brother-in-law and we called the cops on the way over. They arrived at the same time as us and they handcuffed him and took him away and they told Mum that he couldn’t come back there. Mum said she’d see, but the cops said he was a danger to her and they were going to take out a restraining order. She was crying and saying, ‘I never wanted it to come to this,’ but they said that it was a serious matter, her being an older woman on her own and all. They took him away and he spent the night in the lock-up. I called Kay and the two of us stayed the night with Mum.
The next morning, they dropped Brett off at a bus stop in front of the local shopping centre, just a few minutes away from Mum’s house, and told him he had to go somewhere else. Not to Mum’s. I drove around town and stopped at all the homeless shelters looking for him and about three hours later I came back and found him still sitting at the bus stop. Brett didn’t know what to do. He had no idea where to go, so I gave him three hundred dollars and said, ‘Mate, you’re going to have to work it out yourself, ’cos you’re not going back to Mum’s.’
He got up from the bench a couple of minutes later and started walking. I followed him in my car to see where he would go. He went five minutes down the road and he walked up to the front of this pretty expensive hotel and went in. I rang the hotel reception to find out how much it was a night and it was a hundred and fifty bucks for the cheapest room, so he could only have stayed two nights and then he’d have been broke again.
Another time, about six weeks later, he got picked up for aggressive behaviour and the cops dropped him at a homeless shelter and called to let me know where he was. I talked to him out the front of the shelter, but he didn’t want to go inside.
‘It stinks too much in there to sleep,’ he said. ‘And you get robbed. There’s nowhere safe to put your stuff.’ I convinced him to go in there during the day and watch TV, but they told him he had to be out by five if he wasn’t sleeping.
Over the road, there was the police station, and the cops knew him pretty well by then, so they let him sleep near the back door where there was a light and a security camera. They told him they could see him on the monitor, so he had nothing to worry about. It was pretty good of them to look out for him like that. The only thing was, he had to pack up all his stuff by 7 am, when the council street cleaners came through and sprayed and swept the footpath. During the day, the cops let him store his belongings in the fenced-off area behind the station. He lobbed his backpack over the chain-link fence when he left in the morning and they lobbed it back over to him when he came back at five. It wasn’t a bad little system he’d managed to negotiate, all things considered.
We found out later too that while he was on the street and we lost track of him for a while, he met back up with Frog, his best mate from school, in a shelter in St Kilda. Then Frog’s parents died one right after the other, so he inherited their place in Middle Park and let Brett move in with him for a couple of months. That was in July, which explains how he got through the winter, which was something we’d been wondering about. Apparently it wasn’t an easy living arrangement because Frog was trying to stay clean after he got out of rehab and Brett was bringing stuff into the house and leaving it lying around and sometimes Frog would come home and Brett would be smoking something or shooting up in the kitchen.
One day they had an argument out in the street in front of the house that started off just verbal, but then they started scuffling and Frog just gave him a push, but Brett was off his face and wobbled and fell and hit his head on the kerb. Frog at least called an ambulance straight away, which was in fact pretty decent of him given that he could’ve ended up charged and probably back in jail.
So anyway they got Brett to hospital pretty quickly and could relieve the pressure from the bleeding so the brain damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Still, it was pretty significant, especially his planning and decision-making, according to the therapists. In the end, his speech wasn’t too affected, but he could only answer really simple questions. He was fine with ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers, and even straight-out facts, but nothing that needed thinking through.
Once when I was visiting him in the rehab hospital, another patient came and sat on the couch next to me with Brett on the armchair next to us. She started telling us about how she’d been a teacher in a boys’ school.
‘Those students didn’t appreciate the opportunities they were given,’ she said. ‘Did you have a good education?’ she asked Brett. ‘Did you make the most of your time at school?’ Brett didn’t move his head, but his eyes looked over at me. ‘Did you have a privileged childhood?’ she continued. ‘What do you wish you’d known then that you know now?’
I could see the muscles around Brett’s eyes getting stiff and I knew his brain was having trouble keeping track of all the questions. Luckily a staff member came looking for the old lady and took her back to where she was supposed to be.
‘Gawd!’ I said to lighten things up. ‘She can’t half talk.’
‘Yeah,’ said Brett. ‘She can’t half talk.’
* * *
It wasn’t easy to find a permanent place that would take him and the only place we got offered was this nursing home run by a Hungarian church. There are a few non-Hungarians here but mostly they’re people who came out from Hungary in the fifties. Lots of them have Alzheimer’s and are losing their English, or maybe they just prefer to speak their mother tongue. In any case, there aren’t many people to talk to and not many people Brett’s age apart from a woman with early onset dementia, and a couple of the kitchen staff. Brett doesn’t complain—he isn’t much of a talker anyway—but I think the days go slowly for him.
One day I call him up, and we’re talking about birthdays or something and he says, ‘I don’t care what month it is, Tim. I just wait till they give us hot cross buns and then I know it’s Easter.’ When he says it, I think it’s not a bad attitude to have. But later, after I hang up the phone, I feel like maybe he’s only happy now because his brain can’t picture what else he could be doing with his time.
For Christmas, Mum and I go to pick up Brett and bring him back to Kay’s place for lunch. Mum’s bought him a Sydney Swans jumper and he asks if he can unwrap it straight away because he wants to wear it with his beanie to the lunch. When we arrive at Kay’s place, they’ve asked all the kids to come out to the driveway to say hello. The little ones have never seen Brett, and Kay wants to show him that they’re happy to have him in the family. Brett gets out of the car and stands up real straight and shakes hands with the kids. His face is stretched and worried-looking, like a foreign visitor who doesn’t understand what’s going on, but who’s trying to be polite.
We eat lunch outside in Kay’s garden with Mum drinking bubbly in a deckchair in the shade and keeping an eye on things. Brett pulls his chair away from the rest of us a little and feeds bits of turkey to Kay’s cocker spaniel while my brother-in-law tries to keep the conversation going.
After we finish eating we go inside to open the presents. We sit in the lounge room with the kids on the floor near the Christmas tree handing out the parcels. They hand Brett a present and he gets all upset and doesn’t want to open it, saying he feels bad that he didn’t bring anything for us. In the end, though, we convince him to open it. It’s a Sydney Swans beach towel and he’s thrilled with it. He calls the kids over and gives them all the money he has in his wallet—a five-dollar note and a few two-dollar coins. Kay tells him to keep his money, but he says he wants to be their cool uncle and the kids all shake his hand and say, ‘Thanks, cool Uncle Brett.’
Kay’s youngest boy brings over a pile of picture books he got from Nan and sits on the couch next to Brett and starts telling him all about them. He shows him the Dr Seuss books and Transformers sticker album and asks him for help to find Wally in his Where’s Wally? book. After a while Kay calls him away and says, ‘Leave Uncle Brett alone now, Harry. He’s a bit tired.’
Brett asks if he can go for a walk to the beach, so I take him down while the others do the dishes. He takes his new towel and sits on the sand. He takes off his socks and shoes and buries his feet in the wet sand and stares out at the water. I stand behind him and crouch down and take a photo of him with my phone, with his red-and-white-striped beanie with its pompom and his Swans jumper, with the sun on the water and the pier in the background. I tap Brett on the shoulder and show him the photo.
He nods and looks up at me and says, ‘I found Wally.’
I laugh and say, ‘You sure did,’ and he laughs and nods again and turns back around to look at the sea.
* * *
I visit him again on New Year’s Day and we’re sitting in his room and he’s telling me about something crazy that happened to him earlier that morning. He’s always been an early riser and in the nursing home he’s up at five in the morning and he wanders around the corridors in the dark. He tells me that that morning he’s up walking and a really fat guy he’s seen a couple of times downstairs turns around the corner and he’s walking towards him down the corridor. When he gets closer, the fat guy stops. He’s carrying a big plastic pack of cupcakes, the type you buy in bulk at the supermarket, thirty-six cupcakes or something for about ten bucks.
The fat guy looks at Brett and says, ‘You stole my cakes. You stole my cakes.’
Brett doesn’t want any trouble. He became pretty good at avoiding confrontation when he was out on the street, so he just keeps his eyes down and says, ‘Nah, mate. Wasn’t me.’ The fat guy doesn’t respond so Brett just tries to get past him in the corridor, but the guy is so fat and has on these big chunky shoes, and somehow their feet get tangled up and they trip over each other. The fat guy falls with an almighty thud and Brett kind of lands on top of him. Brett says there were cupcakes flying everywhere. They’re stuck to the walls and the carpet and the guy’s clothes. Brett just gets up off him and gets out of there and back to his room. I tell him that was probably the best thing to do and he seems pleased that I think he made a good decision.
* * *
When I come to visit him today, Brett meets me in the lobby. ‘Do you want to take the stairs or the lift?’ he asks me.
‘Let’s take the stairs,’ I say. ‘I can use the exercise.’
A group of old Hungarian ladies with their walking frames arrive in front of the lift doors and Brett says, ‘Hello, ladies. How are we today?’ He pushes the button for them and they all look at him like they can’t remember what he’s doing here. Brett and I start up the stairs and, halfway up, Brett stops and puts his hand on my arm. ‘You know, Tim,’ he says, ‘for the life of me I can’t figure out why they’ve put me here.’ He laughs a small, confused laugh. ‘All these people have issues,’ he says. ‘They’ve got things seriously wrong with them.’
I say, ‘Yeah, mate, I dunno,’ but I don’t smile or laugh. I don’t know what else to say, so I just turn my head away and stand there leaning on the rail and wait for Brett to keep climbing up the stairs.