Nam Le
Hours before sunrise my body’s already soaked with sweat, as though in anticipation of the real heat. Melbourne’s in drought. The city a plain of dust and fire. I wake amidst dreams of Saturday sports as a schoolboy, shin guards and box chafing where the sheets have twisted; noise, collision down the pitch as faraway as a deeper dream. There are Tupperware containers at half-time, frozen wedges of orange. Then a sudden switch and charge, players all around me, the rising breathing in my ears – I am sprinting, dread-filled, from here to there, and here the ball is kicked to there, and there it’s booted – at the very moment I’ve chased it down – somewhere else. The sun is on my face and then it is dark. My brother, my blood and bones, confessor and protector, came in last night, he must be sleeping downstairs, and – as always when he comes – I find my hand on my heart and my mind wide open and wheeling.
I get up and wash my face. The water from the cold faucet is warm, and smells of dirt. Downstairs, a reflexive propriety forestalls me looking at the sleeping form on the couch, and then I look. My brother, Thuan, comes bringing no clues where he’s been. As always, he lies on his back. His mouth is open, his eyelids violent with their shuddered thoughts, and even under the thin sheet I can see the heavy limbs, flat and parallel as though lying in state. He has a powerful body.
I make some coffee in a plunger – not bothering to keep the noise down – and take it outside to the back deck. Surrounded by cicada song I sit down, stare out. Something is wrong. Why else would he have come? I wonder where he’s been but then why does it matter? Away is where he’s been. I think of his last visit three years ago, then Baby’s visit a few months later – how quiet and uncertain she was, how unlike his girlfriend from those rowdier times. Before leaving she hesitated, then asked for thirty dollars; I gave it to her and never saw her again.
Against the darkness, other faces from that shared past occur to my mind with stunning vividness. Even closer, thicker, than the dark is the heat. Another scorcher on the way. Somewhere out there a forest is burning, and a family crouching under wet towels in a bathtub, waiting as their green lungs fill with steam and soot muck. I test the coffee’s temperature. As often happens at this time of morning I find myself in a strange sleep-bleared funk that’s not quite sadness. It’s not quite anything. Through the trees below, the river sucks in the lambency of city, creeps it back up the bank, and slowly, in this way, as I have seen and cherished it for years, the darkness reacquaints itself into new morning.
He’s there now, I sense him, but I say nothing. Minutes pass. A line of second lightness rises into view beside the river: the bike trail.
‘You still got my old T-shirt,’ Thuan says. Even his voice sounds humid. He comes out, barefoot and bare-chested, stepping around my punching bag without even feinting assault.
‘Sleep okay?’
‘If you mean did I drown in my own sweat.’
He’s feeling talkative. ‘You came in late,’ I say. ‘There’s a fan.’
He pads around the deck, inspecting it. Since he was last here I’ve jerry-rigged a small workout area, a tarpaulin overhang. I painted the concrete underfoot in bright, now faded, colours. He lowers himself onto the flat bench. Then under his breath he says, ‘All right,’ as though sceptically conceding a point. He shakes his head. ‘This bloody drought,’ he says.
‘I know, I’ve been going down there,’ I say, nodding at the river. ‘Bringing water up – for the garden and whatnot.’
‘Why?’
‘You know.’ He’s making me self-conscious. ‘The herbs and stuff.’
‘I mean why not just use the hose?’
I glance at him. Where has he been that there aren’t water restrictions? Then I catch his meaning: who cared about the water restrictions? What could they do to you?
A shyness takes hold of me, then I say, ‘I dreamt about Saturday sports.’
To my surprise he starts laughing. He lifts up his face, already sweat-glossed, and bares his mouth widely. Yes, he’s changed since I saw him last. ‘Remember when you broke that guy’s leg?
And they wanted us to forfeit?’
I tell him I remember, though in my memory it was he, and not I, who had done the leg breaking. We’d played on the same team some years. For a confusing moment I’m shuttled back into my morning’s dream: the brittle sky, the sun a pale yolk broken across it. Then the specific memory finds me – the specific faces – the injured kid with what seemed an expression of short-breathed delight, as if someone had just told a hugely off-colour joke; the odd, elsewhere smirk playing on our father’s lips as he came onto the field to collect us, batting off the coach’s earnest officialese, the rising rancour of the opposing parents.
‘The look on his face,’ I scoff.
I wait for Thuan to go on with the story but apparently he’s done. He’s chuckling still, but the sound has no teeth in it and that makes me wary. I feel tested by him.
‘Coffee?’
He thinks about it. Then, as though shoved, he falls backwards along the bench, twisting his upper body at the last second beneath the barbell. Hurriedly I count up the weight – one-twenty kilos on a fifteen-kilo bar – not shameful, but nor is it my PB.
‘Wanna spot?’ I ask, making it clear from my tone that I’m joking.
He jerks the bar off the stand and correctly, easily, completes three presses. When he’s done he remains on his back, arms gone loose on either side of the narrow bench as though parodying one of the weekend kayakers on the river below. I follow his long breaths. For some time he doesn’t move or speak, and in the half-dark I wonder if it’s possible he’s fallen back asleep. All around us the cicadas beat on, their timbre unsteady, deranged by the interminable heat of the night. I settle back too. A strong whiff of sage from the garden. Trees and bushes sliding into their outlines. Buying this place when I came into my inheritance was the smartest thing I ever did – despite its run-down state, subsiding foundations, the light-industrial mills and factories on every side. I couldn’t have known then that ten years on, at thirty-three, I’d be living here alone, jobless. I couldn’t have reasoned that I’d end up folding each of my days into this early-morning mood, trained on the dark river below, sensing that the mood, though ineffable, was one less of sorrow than of loss – and that what I called my life would be answerable to it. I know this: my brother, when he comes, muddies this mood in me. For this I am glad, as for the fact that we are bound to each other in all the ways that matter.
As though invoked, he speaks up. ‘I’ll be out of your hair in a couple of days,’ he says. Then he gets up and goes into the dark bushes, presumably to take a piss.
*
Physical excellence has always been important between us. As a boy, I remember pushing myself in sports because my brother did – following him blindly into school and street games of every type. Unlike me, he didn’t read, or even listen to music; for him the pursuit of physical betterment was its own reason and reward. I remember witnessing – when I was eleven and he thirteen – a push-up contest between my brother and the four Ngo boys. Later, of course, the four of them would be media-tarred as members of that night’s notorious ‘Asian gang’ but in truth they were no gang – they were barely even friends – and famously never on speaking terms. What they were, were brothers. And even back then, in the kids’ room at some family friends’ party in St Albans, squatting around the prone figure of my brother who was younger than all but one of them, they’d already learned to stick together. The contest carried on. With no clear winner emerging, they progressed to push-ups on their knuckles, then push-ups on five fingertips, then one-armed push-ups incorporating these variants – the Ngos dropping out until only Hai, the eldest, remained alongside my brother. Then Hai collapsed. All of us watched in incredulity as Thuan went on to demonstrate a one-armed push-up, left hand tightly clutching his right wrist, where his body’s weight was borne entirely by the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. I was stricken – as much by my brother’s single-mindedness as his strength, the fact he must have practised, in secret, for months. (I say this with confidence because it was only after three months, when I’d buffed two coin-sized spots into the bathroom floorboard, that I managed it myself.)
My brother believed that nothing could make you ridiculous if you were strong. His way was to go at things directly; entering a new school, for example, he would do what movie lore says to do upon entering jail: pick a fight – and win. I wondered what he did in jail. Our father, in his own way, failed to beat this into us, and so my brother beat it into me. I thought then I hated him for it but I was wrong. I wanted to know him – I always have. Now I realise it was only when he asserted himself in physical motion – then, ineluctably, in violence – that I came closest to doing so.
I am on the street of my childhood. I am running late, without any time to scavenge through the disused paddock, veer in and out from under lawn sprinklers – even to catch a breather at the bottom of our steep hill. He’s by himself, waiting for me. Both our parents at work. I’m late, and when I come in the front door he’ll punish me – those are his rules, and they’re clear enough. I come in and there he is, right in front of me, his face almost unbearably inscrutable. He allows me time to put down my schoolbag and deadlock the door. I fumble off my shoes. The hot cord bunches up from my gut into my throat, clogging my breathing. I lift my arms to my face and he slubs me with a big backhander.
‘Where’ve you been? You’re late.’
I nod, lick my cracked lips, crabwalk quickly into the living room. He follows me to the couch where I hunch my back and bury my face in the dark red cushion. Over and over he hits me, his knuckles pounding the hard part of my head where I won’t bruise. The cushion smells of old blood, and spit, and sweat from both our bodies. If I reach behind to feel for the arm, the punishing fist – try to glove it with my own smaller, sweaty palms – he’ll twist and sprain my fingers. If I turn to plead, I’ll meet his face absent of heavy intent, as if his attention is somewhere else, as if he’s bashing my skull to reach something just beyond it. He’s utterly without pity and in my stronger moments I envy that. I’m sorry, I tell him. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. He drives his knee into my lower back. At the height of panic and pain something comes free in me. Afterwards, I wipe my face on the cushion and try not to track blood, if there is blood, all over the carpet. I search my reflection in the bathroom mirror. If there’s visible damage, he’ll barter with me, he’ll let me off next time, he’ll do my chores, buy me jam doughnuts at the tuckshop – so long as I don’t dob him in. But only rarely are there visible signs.
‘What happened?’ Mum asks. She’s had a long day and her face is closed and loose.
‘Nothing.’
She pauses. ‘I’ll tell your dad.’
I look at her scornfully. Even she knows that doesn’t deserve an answer.
One of the common tacks in media accounts of my brother, I noticed – beyond the routine designation of ‘monster’ – was to call attention to his inscrutability. None of the other culprits merited such consideration. The Ngo boys, for instance, always looked thuggishly guilty. But courtroom reporters and sketch artists described, artfully and self-consciously, their failure of scrutiny in the face of Thuan Xuan Nguyen; a face typically depicted as ‘smooth’, or ‘mask-like’, on someone whose very name rebuffed pronunciation in each of its three syllables. I could understand their frustration. My brother was a person in whom deep faults ran, yet always he seemed to conduct them into something like charisma. All my life I never judged him; to me he represented the fulfilment of my own genomic seed and tatter. I never suspected, after all that happened, at the trial and beyond, that complete strangers might also be capable of my reservation. This is not to defend what he did. This is to say I understood, completely, the media’s macabre, manic insistence on the details of that night. The facts of the matter. The altercation and eviction from the nightclub. The first victim chased down and hacked to death by a gang wielding machetes, meat cleavers and samurai swords. The sickening count of wounds on his body. Victims two and three fleeing into the Yarra, carried by the water approximately 200 metres to the west – shadowed alongshore by the gang. One with gashes on his wrists and forearms, three fingers missing below the knuckle, from a presumed attempt to return to shore. Chances are you may recall these details. The sober-faced, riverside TV reports, the strongly worded declarations by members of the mayor’s office, the Homicide Squad, the Asian Squad – while in the wintry background, day on day, the grieving families held vigil, wailing in Vietnamese as they proffered incense sticks, lit and let go of tissue paper. You may have even heard me speak, in one of my presentations, about this incident. Most people recognise my brother only through one of his tabloid nicknames: the Meat Cleaver Murderer. He was there on the bank that night. Here’s what most people won’t know – what I’ve never spoken about: I was there with him.
*
When it gets light my brother showers and heads out. I laze on the couch in the living room, windows open but curtains drawn, shirtless in front of the rickety fan, rolling a chilled glass bottle of water back and forth across my chest. Otherwise, I try not to move. When the phone rings, it’s Mum – one of her friends has just spotted Thuan on Victoria Street. Is it true? Has he come back?
I’m waiting for him when he returns. We have to go visit Mum, I tell him. He stops, then nods, puts his sunnies back on. Outside, the air is so hot it immediately dries out my lungs; I can feel the bitumen boiling through my sandals. This is a killing sun. We walk south, through the Abbotsford chop shops and factories, the streets made slow, strange with heat vapour, the sudden assaultive glare of metal surfaces. People move, then pause in scant shadows. On the main street the tramlines look as though they’re liquefying. Too hot to think, let alone speak, we make our way towards the high-rise flats.
‘Child?’ our mother asks when she opens the door. She’s wearing brown silk pyjamas and there’s absolutely no sweat on her face.
‘Hello, Ma.’ My brother touches her shoulder for a second. She reaches up and cups his ear, then turns to smile at me.
When our father died I advised her to sell the house and car and move here – the flat was government-subsidised, located in the heart of a Vietnamese neighbourhood. During that period she was used to doing whatever I said. I see, looking back, it must have been hard going for her – moving from a family home with yard, driveway and garden to living alone in an inner-city warren sentried by closed-circuit cameras. Up urine-doused lifts and down fumigated corridors. Since then, though, she’s grown to like it. She likes the proximity to her new circle of friends, to Victoria Street a block away, and – a few blocks behind that – to me. After all that happened, I sometimes wondered how her friendships suffered – I loathed the thought of her being judged by that array of flat faces and slit eyes, besieged by their silent, hostile curiosities – but of course she’d never have discussed any of that with me.
The dining table, predictably and yet astonishingly, is covered with food. Mum comes out of the kitchen with a jug full of mint leaves and cut lemon halves. She pours our drinks, enquires after my herb garden, brings out a colander brimming over with fresh basil and purple mint and coriander. She’ll send some cuttings home with me, she says; the residents picked the community garden clean due to the drought. Every now and then, as she speaks, she’ll stop to look at my brother.
‘You’ve been in the sun,’ she says. She wets a cloth under the kitchen tap and lays it across the back of his neck.
We eat with courteous gusto. These are all our favourite dishes: spring rolls, shredded chicken coleslaw, a plain winter melon soup offset by caramelised salty pork. My brother doesn’t talk, so neither do I. The silence becomes the outside wind: up here on the eighteenth floor it’s a constant commotion, driving dust and sound through the metal window jambs, shaking the very light. Every so often I see smallish cockroaches stopping, as though disoriented, in the middle of their skitterings. Oblivious, we eat, and before we’re done with any given dish Mum carts it off – brings forth a new one. For a moment it’s as though we’ve ducked out from our nearer past; we’re back in our St Albans kitchen, nothing to say, waiting for Mum to finish up. Not knowing it would chase us all down – this past still in front of us. Then, she cooked and we ate. Later, she sat down and couldn’t stand up again in a Victorian Supreme Court public toilet, her eldest son counted push-ups in his cell, body wet with heft and speed, I stood in front of strangers and spoke them both down into small dots of sense. Later, she sat with her back straight and head bent, I stood in front of people and delivered up her dead husband.
In cold weather you find the dead roaches behind the radiators, under the electric kettle, microwave, fridge, where they group for warmth. When it’s this hot where do they go?
‘Child is well?’ Finally she’s seated, facing Thuan. The dishes are cleared and there’s a platter of fruit on the table.
‘I’m fine,’ he says.
She starts to respond, then stops. Her fingers reach out to test the lacquer of a cut lemon face, left open to the air.
‘Really,’ he says. He sounds like he means it.
‘It’s so sad what happened to Baby,’ she says. She, too, is thinking about death. ‘I didn’t even know she was sick like that.’
‘Baby? What happened?’
‘Thank you for coming to see me. I know you’re very busy.’
‘You don’t know about Baby?’ I ask despite myself.
Thuan frowns, then reaches over and squeezes our mother’s shoulder. ‘Ma. Guess what.’
‘Where you’ve been, or what you’ve been doing, is your own business,’ she continues. She says this shyly and forthrightly, a settlement of fact. ‘I don’t need you to look after me.’
‘I know, Ma.’
‘And Lan, he is very good. He can look after himself.’
‘He is very good,’ repeats Thuan, completely deadpan.
‘I hear about Lan speaking at universities, at the community centre, and it makes me very happy.’ My brother throws me an offhand smile, and in a ritual manner she follows up his smile, almost too sweetly. Turning her attention to me: ‘He has become a brave and caring man.’
I get up, go to the window. There has always been a touch of formal drama about my mother, and a situation like this – her prodigal son’s return after three long years – is bound to draw it out. Through the wind-rattled window I watch some seagulls, hovering in the air the way seagulls do. The air is runny with heat and bleaches the blue sky.
Mum’s speaking again. ‘I know I can’t tell you what to do. But I’m your mother and I don’t want my sons to be angry with each other.’
I turn around. My brother’s mouth is slightly open, sly at one corner.
‘I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here. I want my sons to look after each other.’ She speaks with care, a prepared grace. ‘Your father would want that too. Remember when you were children, you looked after each other.’
In grade three, when my parents found out I was being bullied, they left it to my brother to beat up the malefactor. Recess the next day Thuan climbed out of the concrete playground tunnel from one end, then, a long minute later, Matty Fletcher from the other, smiling with his mouth full and one hand low on his gut. My family used to bring this up at every chance. Now, Mum stops, following the thought to its logical implication. Another track cut off next to a night river. Nothing, during the trial, was so cruel as watching the jury coaxed and coerced by weeks of ‘similar fact evidence’ alleging Thuan’s propensity for violence – until it was all anyone could see of him. She must have been confounded, afterwards, by the new plot of her life – how, whether forward or back, it inescapably led her, as it did both her sons, to that one night – as though it were exactly where we were all meant to be.
‘I’ve been saving some money,’ she says.
‘Ma.’ His insouciance has settled now.
‘I need you to come to the bank with me later. To sign some papers. If you have time.’
‘Listen, Ma, I don’t need money.’
‘You’re the oldest, so I want you to look after it.’
For a moment no one speaks. In the yellow emptiness behind the window I hear voices, strains of Asian opera riding the hot red wind from a different floor, maybe a different building. The glass-warmed sun on my face. I’m brought back to mornings waking up when my pillow is so suffused with sun, the air through the open window so full of a sense of lost summer, that I clench my eyes closed again, coach those voices at the bottom of my hearing to sing louder, bear higher their meaning.
‘Child,’ says Mum, her tone finally relaxing. ‘You’re too good for money now?’
Thuan leans back at the table, slightly embarrassed.
Mum stands up, brushing smooth her silk pyjama top. ‘Heavens,’ she says, ‘it’s been so long since I saw you. I’m going to tell you the truth – I didn’t know if I would see you again.’ Then, with her usual restraint, she checks herself. Smiling privately, as though she’s decided she has all the time she needs, she picks up the jug and heads into the kitchen to make more iced tea.
*
‘So Baby.’
The lift drops with the sound of metal squealing against itself.
‘Two or three years ago,’ I say. ‘It was an accident, they think.’
He looks straight ahead. ‘OD?’
I nod.
‘She was still in Footscray?’
‘Yeah, probably. I think so. I saw her – she was all straightened out.’
He frowns, maybe sensing my lie. ‘Not if she was still hanging out in Footscray she wasn’t.’ It’s the first time I’ve heard an edge of the old hard tone. ‘Jesus,’ he mutters. The lift opens, and I follow him through the two security doors back out into the heat.
In the presentations I’ve been asked to give, I generally concentrate on sociological factors until the inevitable moment I find myself nudged towards the incident. The cops at our door two days later, their duteous, scornful faces, all the scorn sucked into their eyes and the edges of their mouths as if to curb them from asking, What kind of animals are you? That you could do this to your own? These are not, I think, unfair questions. But the people who turn to me for answers aren’t looking to my master’s in political science, they’re looking at my one-of-them face, they’re looking at my pedigree of proximity: the fact I’m my brother’s brother. Not that I’m one of them, of course. I’m articulate and deferential, I’m charming to just the right degree. It’s that they trust me to tell them the inside story. They want to know – beneath the affidavits and agreed facts – how it happened. And so when I talk about socioeconomic disadvantage, about ghettoisation and tribal acting-out, about inexorable cycles of escalation, I say these things and I mean them, but even to me they start to sound insincere. What I mean to say but don’t – can’t – is that everything always starts with a girl, and in this case the girl was Baby.
My brother was nineteen and one night came home drunk, flushed, probably high, and with a girl. This last had never happened before. There was a shadow on his jaw which I assumed was a bruise. After some time the girl said to me, ‘I’m Baby,’ then turned to him and exclaimed, ‘I can’t believe you weren’t gonna introduce me!’ then kissed him, all the while still talking into his mouth. He made some joke and she laughed and I was relieved, hearing her laugh, that it wasn’t the cutesy, infant squeaking so many Asian girls liked to perform in front of guys.
‘He talks about you all the time,’ she said, and laughed again.
I decided I liked her.
How long they’d been together wasn’t clear. It seemed, from Baby’s comfort with him, that it might have been a while. She was my brother’s first girlfriend, I think, and I’m not sure why that didn’t surprise me at the time. They’d just come home from a fight. I mentally staged it during their telling: Baby’s ex had been at the club, an Asian night, stewing deeper and hotter in Hennessy the longer he watched them until, at the final, emptying hour – the music switched off and lights on, bartenders wiping down bars, tallying the take – he’d called up his mates and followed them outside.
Something flew out of the night towards Thuan’s head. He ducked, the bottle smashing against a car, setting off the alarm. I knew that club: its main entrance fed onto a cul-de-sac backed in by warehouses, steel roller doors, a multi-storey car park giving out the only light. Under that spotty, gas-like glow, my brother turned around and saw them – maybe a dozen of them. Their movements loose and stiff with alcohol. He had Baby with him, and the four Ngo brothers – that was it. Breath shortening, the great engine of his glands working till he felt again the thick twists of hormones through his body, he fended Baby back against the blaring car, made quick eye contact with the Ngos, for whom he felt himself flooding with a feeling of deep loyalty, and waited. You can always tell the seriousness of a fight by the speed of first approach. Baby’s ex feinted forward, then his crew herky-jerked at them, and instantly my brother knew in his body the entire shape of what would follow. The only surprise was the set of strangers who jumped in to help them; it was only later, in the nervy racing-away euphoria, that they were introduced as Baby’s friends from Footscray; only later still, well past the point of ready return, that he learned the guy in the red baseball cap – as affable afterwards as he was vicious during the fight – was another of Baby’s exes.
‘You should’ve been there,’ Thuan said magnanimously, rubbing the sore spot on his jaw. ‘We could have used you out there tonight.’
‘You did okay,’ said Baby.
I studied her closely – this girl they’d all fought over. She had a face struck together by contrasts: the Asian hair – so black it looked wet – offset by almost European features: chalky skin, sunken cheeks, lips in a burnished shade of red that belonged to some earlier, jazz-smoked era. Her body was slight and wonderfully slouched. She had, all in all, the look of a good girl gone a bit grungy. Thinking of their story, I saw her arms lined by light in the alley, locked crossed amid the scudding bodies, the car alarm caterwauling through her skull. Then I saw my brother watching her. He looked the happiest I’d ever seen him.
‘I wish I had been there,’ I said, and meant it.
That summer, I spent more time with Thuan than ever before or since; Baby liked my company, insisted on it, and my brother was surprisingly acquiescent – especially given we’d never really had any mutual friends. She called him Little T and so, with even less reason, I became Big T. I came to need her, and probably what I needed most about her was him: the emergent, intricate person he became around her. He developed a way of talking to me through her, in third-person – Look at him – and he reckons he’s not on steroids! She kept him kind to me like that. At Brighton Beach she stripped to a grey bikini. When he caught me staring, he gave me a look that was warning and mockery, shy and full of braggadocio, knowing and forgiving all at once. Do you see what I mean? We lived then in slow-time; the light more viscous, the breath drawn deeper into our bodies. I had a new brother and a new name – how would I not rally to both?
*
When we get back, Thuan breaks the silence and tells me to head inside – he’s going to keep wandering. There’s no invitation in his announcement so I go in – glad to escape the punishing heat – strip to my boxers, splash water over my face and chest. I think for a droll moment of working out. Then I resume my place on the couch, following the creak of the fan, the odd foolhardy cyclist whizzing by on the track below.
The wind sears my face awake. I’m sodden and sticky. I find myself incredibly aroused. The wind feels as though it’s passed through fire. I press my face into the cushion and reach for myself, drowsing into the familiar memory of Baby, that one time. The habitual quickening. She came over to our house wheeling a large suitcase full of clothes to launder. Yes. These trips were timed so both our parents would be out working the night shift. My brother steered and shut her up in his room, not knowing I could hear their every other sound. At the end of the night she unloaded the dryer and folded her clothes into the suitcase.
‘Need any help with that?’
‘I’ll be right.’
‘You can carry it down the stairs?’
A flirtatious pause.
‘Sure, you can help me bring it down.’
I glided to the window and lifted the hem of the blinds. I was nearly seventeen. They left, as usual, by the small unlit walkway between the fence and my side of the house. And as usual, they tarried in the dark, swaying in and away from each other, whispering, and I cracked open the window to listen in from above.
‘So what’s the going tip for a bellboy here?’ she asked.
Outside, the night was cool and a wind blew full and quiet along the empty street, carrying with it the scent of new flowers, jasmine and hibiscus and bougainvillea. A wood chime sounded from a neighbour’s porch.
‘Just a quick blow job,’ he said.
She spluttered out a low laugh, pushed and punched him. Then they kissed. She kissed him soft and then she kissed him hard, and after some abortive fumblings she spun around and folded herself over the standing suitcase. She wriggled her pants down to her knees.
‘Make it quick,’ her voice hissed.
He shoved down his own pants and grabbed her pale hips. He leaned and rocked over her. The wheels scrabbled wildly across the concrete but the suitcase stayed upright. From where I was watching, all I could see of Baby was the side of her head, curtained off by her jogging black hair. She nodded and nodded and nodded and I watched. Finally they stopped, remaining locked together, almost statue-like. Then she unbent herself, bobbed her knees in a little curtsey, and reached between her legs with two fingers.
‘You,’ she said, grinning delightedly, jabbing her fingers at his chest, ‘are going to get me pregnant.’
He shushed her and automatically she looked around, scoping the street. Then she looked up – and saw me. I jerked back but didn’t dare release the blinds. After an appalling hesitation, she lowered her gaze, then straightened her clothes. She took possession of her suitcase handle. My brother stood there half-slouched and stupid. I ignored him. I watched instead the new self-consciousness in Baby’s body – or did I imagine it? – as she walked away, leaning her weight forward, scraping and sledding her suitcase across the street.
‘I never want to see you again,’ my brother abruptly shouted into the night. ‘Take your stuff and get out of here!’
With a wicked smile she turned in our direction. ‘I’m never coming back!’ she called out. She heaved the suitcase into the boot and slammed it shut.
Something occurs to me from my childhood I haven’t thought about for years. After a particularly nasty beating, if I swore to tell our parents – and his bribes and proofs of contrition weren’t enough to dissuade me – my brother would threaten to run away. How strange that I now remember this with something like nostalgia. He would stalk to the closet and take out a suitcase and then he’d start packing it, leaving me mute-stricken as I tagged helplessly and furiously behind him, horrified by the thought of being responsible for his loss – and, far more deeply, of losing him. I’d break, of course, and agree to anything if only he agreed to stay. Was this what it was to love somebody? I guessed it had to be.
A few weeks after my brother’s open-air tryst with Baby, we received word that the Ngo brothers had been ambushed at the casino. The crew from that nightclub fight was responsible; they’d driven all the way in, we later learned, from Sunshine. The youngest Ngo, Peter, had had two of his ribs broken with a cricket bat. They’d been out with the Footscray crew from the same fight – the one with Baby’s red-capped ex – with whom they’d since become mates. Straight away there was talk of revenge, and soon enough there was another fight, at another Asian night, when Red Cap recognised one of the Sunshine boys. This time, knives were produced, and two people cut.
To Thuan and me, none of this, in itself, seemed critical. These fights happened all the time without ever reaching the hospitals, let alone the courts or headlines. The Ngos were known hot-heads. And everyone accepted that the club scene was booby-trapped with grudges and grievances, blood ties and vendettas and bonds of blind loyalty. Asian nights had been banned in Sydney for exactly this reason. The shock of what followed in this case lay mostly in the speed and savagery of its escalation. Afterwards, there was a fair bit of carry-on about who could have done what, when, to whom, to excite such action – but I’ll confess that, as irrational and unfair as it may sound, and though it can’t really be said to have presaged anything, as soon as Baby looked up that cool night, and commanded my eye, and showed me how dangerous her desire was, how matter-of-fact her recklessness – I knew right then I could no longer be shocked by anything that touched her.
For Thuan it was already too late. First, it emerged that she’d been in contact with Red Cap, her ex, all along – that in fact he was her on-again off-again dealer. I saw my brother’s face when he found out, felt the shock and deep retreat as though it were my own. He broke it off with her. She contacted me and pleaded her innocence. She was crying, and had never looked more beautiful. It was over, she said; she’d been clean the whole time, she said, and, still believing her, I passed it on. They reconciled. I was wracked with strong ambivalence seeing, even momentarily, my brother so vulnerable. A week later, a friend of mine spotted Baby in Sunshine with her other ex – the one who’d picked the first fight with my brother. I confronted her. At first she denied it, then she stopped short. It was impossible to go anywhere in a Vietnamese enclave without being noted – she understood that.
‘Okay,’ she sighed. ‘I went there.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘I heard …’ She paused, reconsidered. ‘Him and his mates are planning an attack. A big one.’
‘On who?’
‘Johnny. My ex. And all the rest of his friends. Your friends too – the brothers.’
We were in her car, on our way to pick Thuan up from somewhere, and she spoke straight ahead, into the busy windscreen.
‘You know this? You gotta tell them.’
‘I don’t know.’ She frowned, chewed at her lower lip. ‘I know him. He just wants to be the big man. That’s all it was, I just went there to ask him to stop all this.’
‘What’d he say?’
She glanced over at me, and there was a small, strange crease around her eyes I hadn’t seen before.
‘He said he’d think about it.’
‘Okay.’
She drove on a while, then, as though resolving some internal question, she swung her head from side to side. ‘Big T, he wanted me to beg.’
All my life I’ve been told I’m not very good at reading people. There is, I think, some truth to this. Baby, in particular, was so changeable that any attempt would usually be offside and out of step. But in that moment, I was inspired by an intense insight to say nothing, to sit still and let her ravelled thinking tease itself out. In my concentration my face must have lapsed into a frown.
She looked over, cringed slightly. ‘I guess you already know,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘Do you wanna pull over? Talk about this?’
‘I would love that.’
She pulled into a petrol station and parked by the air pump. Again, I waited for her to speak.
‘You’re sweet,’ she said nervously. She tilted the rear-view mirror down and checked her face. Then she told me how, when she’d gone back to plead with her ex, one thing had led to another. Not like that. But she still wasn’t sure how it had happened.
‘What happened?’
She paused. ‘I don’t want your brother to think I’m a slut.’ Her voice was small but quickly hardening. ‘That’s what he called me last time.’
We sat in silence as the car ticked. Slut. The word led me to the image of her bent over a wobbling suitcase, pants scrunched down to her knees. Sand and salt on her wet skin. The lie of the bikini on her body.
‘Yeah but you did fuck him, didn’t you?’ I could feel my heart throttling my ribs as I thought this, and then, unbelievably – as I said it. Now the new word – the new image it called up – landed heavy and wet between us.
Baby jutted out her jaw. She jerked her head in my direction but didn’t look at me. ‘You can’t … Look, it’s not like I’m going out with you.’
‘Right.’
‘You can’t talk to me like that.’
‘Right. It’s not like he’s my brother. Like the last time you fucked around, who was it that patched everything up for you?’
She inhaled sharply. She said, ‘I screwed up.’ Then she turned to me, her face gone cunning. ‘But what’s the deal with you two anyway? What sort of fucked-up thing is that?’ Her skin was clenched tight around the eyes, her jaw muscles working her thoughts. ‘I don’t even know why he lets you follow him around. Almost like he’s scared of you or something. Like you’ve got something on him – the way you’ve got something on me – ’cos that’s what you do, right, Big T? Spy on everyone? Get all the dirt?’
As she spoke, the space inside the hatchback seemed to shrink. It was as though everything real, dimensional, was happening here, inside, while the windows were actually screens broadcasting a program of outside movement and colour. In this enclosure I became acutely aware of her smell – sweat from where her body had kneaded the seat, the chemical tang of her shampoo.
Without thinking I reached for her.
She flinched. ‘I’m sorry,’ she coughed, then, somewhat unsteadily, she undid her seatbelt, leaned forward, and peeled her cardigan off. I realised her cheeks were wet. I didn’t know what I wanted. ‘Sorry,’ she repeated, and offered both her naked arms to me. She was sobbing now, quietly. And then I saw what it was she was trying to show me. The two dark mottled bands around her wrist, and two more around her biceps. The bruises yellow and orange and green, and myself enraptured and repulsed by them. The rot and ripe of them. Most strangely, I felt myself powerfully flushed with a sense that I only much later recognised – and ultimately accepted – as betrayal.
I told my brother a friend had seen her go into the ex’s house. I told him to ask her himself. I told him – thinking he’d be happy to hear it – that this ex was gearing up for a major attack against the Footscray crew. I told him my source was unimpeachable.
*
The afternoon, finally, is cooling down when Thuan returns. He catches me half-naked in the kitchen. ‘I’ve washed up in plenty of kitchen sinks,’ he assures me. He’s carrying a slab of Carlton Bitter under one arm and holding a supermarket bag in the other. ‘Meat,’ he explains, ‘for the barbie.’
‘Where’d you go?’
He ignores me, sets the bag down, rips a couple of cans out of their tight plastic trap. When he throws me a beer I realise it’s exactly what I feel like. The rest of the cans he tips into an esky. By silent consensus we head outside and sit on the deck. Through the gums and melaleucas, the thick pelt of scrub and sedge along its banks, the river is light brown, slow, milky. This river that famously flows upside down. The day’s heat hangs in the air but is no longer suffocating. The brightness no longer angry. We finish the beers, and then the next ones, and the next. I hadn’t realised how thirsty I was. He tells me he walked along the river, up to the falls. He saw kayakers there, rehearsing their moves, and uni students doing water tests. He stops, losing interest in his own story. I picture the concrete-capped, rubbish-choked weir, the graffitied basalt boulders, all dominated by the Eastern Freeway roaring overhead. I wonder whether it brought to his mind another river – the same river – running beside and below a different freeway. I wonder whether, when he stares out at this river now, he connects it to that other river a few Ks dead south of here; if he follows it, in his mind’s eye, through its windings and loops, through Collingwood, and Abbotsford, and Richmond, and Burnley – to South Yarra.
He throws me another beer. The barbeque is all but forgotten. I’m getting a bit dreamy with alcohol, my mind draggling in the heat.
‘So what’s going on with you anyway?’
‘What?’ I say, even though I heard him. I have no idea why I said this. I start to audition sentences to make my answer over but this only affirms the silence. My brother snorts, then hoists his drink in a wry toast. I skol my can, stand up and torpedo it into the bush. I’ll pick it up later. A pair of rowers glance at us from the river and wave.
‘Jesus,’ my brother says, ‘I really screwed her up.’
‘Nothing you could have done. She was on edge the whole time.’ After my last chance, I’m now eager to speak. ‘Probably junk too. And those friends of hers – in Footscray.’
‘What?’ His brow creases. ‘Nah, I meant Mum.’ He looks at me curiously for a second, then scoffs at himself. ‘Though her too, I guess.’
I recall a story Baby told me during her last visit, how a friend of hers in detention had collapsed from withdrawal; the male guards had grabbed her, double-cuffed her, stuck a motorbike helmet on her head for two days so she couldn’t ‘hurt herself.’
‘Mum still going up to that temple?’
He’d come back from jail and I’d fantasised about receiving his confidences. He’d copped the time for both of us – knowing, surely, that I would’ve done the same. But he hadn’t grown more open at all. Nor the couple of other times he’d visited. Only this time seemed different. This was the most communicative I’d ever seen him.
‘In Sunshine? I think so.’ He doesn’t react, so I go on, ‘I think once she ran into one of the families there. I heard one of them spat in her face.’
He nods absently. ‘And you? You okay?’
The side-stepped directness of his question stuns me. I saunter my arm out along the view. ‘What’s not to be okay about?’
‘Listen,’ he says. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘What?’
‘That stuff Mum said about you doing talks.’
‘It’s nothing. Just uni stuff.’ I feel myself smirking. ‘They just need someone with slanty eyes who can speak in their language.’
‘What sort of stuff do you say?’
‘You know – just whatever they wanna hear.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like poverty, or language issues. Cultural marginalisation …’
‘They don’t ask about what happened that night?’
‘You mean do I talk about you.’
He shakes his head impatiently. He’s working himself up to something and it puts me on edge. ‘I mean, don’t they ask why? Why I did it? I mean, isn’t all the rest of it bullshit?’
‘Why we did it. I was there too.’
‘Yeah,’ he says, visibly annoyed at having been interrupted. ‘You’re right. I forget. I’m sorry.’ I wait for him to go on but now I’ve mucked up his thinking. ‘It’s all bullshit,’ he says again, struggling to recall his argument, and out of some old fraternal deference I find myself looking away. I listen to the frogs gulping for air down by the rushes. The black ducks and reed warblers. My heart is beating harder and harder. I know, of course, what he’s referring to – it’s the same thing that brings him here each time, then each time strikes him silent: the mind-boggling bullshit of me, years on, still with nothing but time, still cashing in, ever more deeply, on his time. Those twelve bullshit years piled on the back of a single night’s spur of the moment. That night, too, I’d felt the same sick, heady exhilaration talking to him like this – like we were friends.
‘You’re shaking,’ he had pointed out. We’d made it home and both showered; he’d scrubbed his face, I noticed, until it was bright pink. The corners of his temple lined with delicate blue veins.
‘I can’t piss. My bladder feels heavy as, but nothing comes out.’
He’d frowned, then reached out and clutched my neck with one of his strong pink hands. I knew the strength of those hands. My stomach hitched. He didn’t say anything, and at the physical contact I was shuddered back to our surreal, silent trip in the car; the fog descending upon the freeway canyons, the red blinking lights of radio towers blooming like blood corollas in the mist. The streets had sucked us through the city and shot us home.
‘If they come for us,’ my brother had said to me.
‘No one saw us.’
‘You weren’t there. If they come for us, you weren’t there.’
‘Hai and Long and Quang saw me.’
‘No they didn’t. I’ll talk to them.’
‘What about you?’
‘No matter what they say – so-and-so saw you, so-and-so ratted you out. Don’t listen to them. You weren’t there.’
‘What about you?’
He patted my neck, then removed his hand. The absence was a freezing burn. He was my rough flesh, he was rooted in the same soil, his heart and brain fed by the same blood, and never before had I felt so needful of him. He stood up and abruptly grimaced, clutching his right knee. Then his face smoothed over again. ‘I don’t think anyone who saw me will talk,’ he said. ‘But it shouldn’t take them long. To find out about the Ngos. And then me.’
‘You mean Baby?’
He nodded, then let out a short burst of air.
‘What?’
‘I’m not saying she’ll talk,’ he said.
‘She’s the one who called me.’
To this day I remember how, when I told him this, he’d shaken his head and smiled. ‘I know,’ he’d said, as though unexpectedly amused. ‘Everything always goes back to Baby.’ Now it is summer, my brother sits with me on the deck of my own house and his face, sweaty and cooked well past pink, confirms itself in that same expression – bemused, sardonic, slightly otherwise occupied.
‘Listen to me,’ he says. ‘I’m glad you didn’t have to go down with me.’ His tone is flat with finality. ‘That was the best thing that happened this whole mess.’
‘Okay.’
‘That was the opposite of bullshit.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He waves it off. The light is dimming now and he turns away, but not before I catch a brief tensile movement in his expression. There’s a discipline holding his face together. I’m horrified by the sudden realisation that maybe he’s lying to me. ‘But see,’ he goes on, ‘what I mean is this. I was there, you were there. I don’t remember hardly anything. I was off my head but still.’ He pauses, perhaps suspicious of his own earnestness. Neither of us looks at the other. ‘Haven’t you tried to think about it, why we did it, and you can’t tell what’s what?’
I decide, in the brief silence that follows, that he’s not actually asking me this question.
‘What happened,’ he goes on, ‘and what everyone else says that happened?’
My face has reverted to its little-brother mask – imploring his censure and contempt, his instruction.
‘You’d think you’d remember everything.’
I nod. I approximate a wry sound. Then I venture, ‘I do. I do remember.’
He stops to absorb this. Then slowly, and to my great relief, his face slides back into its ironic smile. ‘Well, you have to. Otherwise, who’s gonna give those bloody speeches?’
*
That night. I remembered that night very clearly. I’d been at a different club. They’d all gone to Jade – another Asian night – and I hated Asian nights. Too many try-hards, too much attitude. I was in the toilets when I got the call. There was a guy next to me pissing with both hands in his pockets. It was one of the most intimidating things I’d ever seen. I was pretty buzzed by that time, and when I answered the phone, Baby’s tinny laughing was of a piece with the cackling going on and off in one of the stalls, and then – out in the club – the DJ’s chop to a bass-heavy loop, the dewy, overripe smell of teenage girls. I found a quieter corner so I could hear her.
‘Swords!’ she was saying. Then I realised she wasn’t laughing. ‘They’ve got fucking swords!’
Outside, it was drizzling. I ran down the road, past the shawled girls with clopping heels, the corners and culverts reeking of piss, the darkened power poles specked with staples. Overhead, the wet telephone wires gleamed completely gold in the streetlight, like charged filaments, even though my mind insisted on them as black, sheathed in black plastic. I reached the car, which I’d parked at a defunct petrol station – now just a low, flat, broken roof spewing water onto the oil-stained concrete. As soon as I stopped running, I vomited. I got in the car and caught my breath. I called Baby. She didn’t answer. I called my brother.
‘Fuck,’ he panted. ‘Fucking fuck.’
‘What happened? Where are you?’
He was running, his breath loud and jagged. The wind took his voice. There was no time to explain. He told me where to pick him up, down near the river. It was only a few minutes away.
I arrived at the corner of Church and Alexandra. Across the road from the brightly lit car dealership, human shapes were scampering in every direction. They were all guys, all Asians – some carrying glinting weapons and cudgels. I saw one pull down the beak of his baseball cap over his eyes. Not daring to stop, I slowed the car as I passed, made out what looked like a small pile of dirty clothes on the nature strip. Then I saw, pale and inverted, the telltale hand. There was no blood. The head must have been concealed by a piece of flapping fabric, or maybe the ground fell away. There was nothing to indicate a body that had been smashed and stabbed to bits, but even then I knew that was what I was looking at, and the knowledge rocked in my skull, riled up my blood.
I drove on a bit further and parked on the grassy shoulder, making sure to turn off the engine and lights. I took out my phone, my hands trembling, saw three missed calls from Baby. I tried her again but again no one answered. Then the phone rang. My brother. Where was I? I told him what I’d seen, we had to get the fuck out of there. Not yet. Where was I? Okay, I should meet him on the other side of the bridge. When? Now. Right now.
I got out of the car. The wind had picked up, gusting sideways on my face. I spat and could see my slag sail forever. Behind me the faux-gothic columns of Melbourne High School were upwardly lit. I crossed the road to the riverbank and ran along the bike path, under bare tree boughs creaking and contending in the wind. Some distance ahead of me, windows in condominium buildings glowed in what seemed secret patterns. I ran into the wind. A car bore down on me, its headlights tunnelling through the thickening fog, changing the shape of the road. It passed in a vicious swipe of noise. By the time I reached the body, which had been left strangely unattended, a veneer had been ripped away within me, an innate excuse brought full-blooded to life. I crossed the bridge.
My brother was three-quarters across. He wore an open-necked shirt as though it wasn’t the heart of winter, and leaned against a lamp-lit column as though bored, as though waiting for a late tram. As soon as I reached him he spun around without a word and sprinted down some white-glowing stairs that led to the north bank of the river. There was another track down there, squeezed between the Monash Freeway on one side and the river on the other.
I can’t tell you what it felt like, racing through the cold night with my brother. On our right the concrete-and-plastic freeway barricade flickering our progress, on our left the river, and beneath us the paved path springing our feet forward and fast. The wind kicking at our backs. At no point did I second guess what we were doing. I spent my life waiting for him to talk me into something and now the wash of adrenaline through my veins urged me on, faster and faster, as though to chase down, catch my own breath. A voice floated across the river. My brother slowed down, then stopped. His face haggard with exertion but steely, the set of his jaw exuberant.
I turned, breathing heavily, towards the voice. Under the high moon, the river was a trough of light and it was difficult to see behind it. Then I saw. There were two black shapes in the shine. In the darkness opposite there were three more shapes. I soon recognised their voices – the three elder Ngos. They spat and swore into the river.
‘Who are they?’ I asked, pointing to the two black heads bobbing next to each other. ‘Is that Baby’s ex?’
Thuan nodded. ‘And his brother.’
The two of them seemed to roll and ride over each other on the same spot of river. Every now and then an arm would flail up. Their occasional cries made no sense.
‘They’re pissed as,’ I said.
‘Swim over here,’ Hai sang out. ‘I dare you, come on.’
‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘He’s got a fucking samurai sword.’
Instinctively I turned to Thuan and saw, for the first time, his fist gripping a meat cleaver. Looking more closely, I noticed his pants gashed above one knee. His sock beneath that knee was discoloured by blood; on his other foot the sock was white. My lungs filled with air.
‘Please,’ one of the swimmers beseeched. His voice was low and shaky.
Then, as though they’d just made us out, the two of them began to splash their way towards our bank. My brother looked on impassively. A mist was beginning to settle over the water and the faster swimmer side-stroked awkwardly beneath it.
‘That’s him,’ my brother murmured.
The swimmer came closer. His mouth was wild above and below the water, his eyes blinking non-stop. Vapour sputtering from between his teeth.
‘Please,’ he croaked.
I watched my brother for weakness.
‘He can’t swim. My brother can’t swim.’
‘Don’t come any closer,’ Thuan said. ‘You had your chance.’
‘Fuck him up,’ Hai shouted from the other bank.
‘What chance? Oh God. Oh God, oh God, oh fuck.’
The icy water weighted his clothes, forcing him to kick hard to stay afloat. Behind him, his brother moved more erratically. I could hear him hyperventilating loudly.
‘Please,’ Baby’s ex said. ‘Please, he can’t swim. He’s got asthma. Please, it’s enough.’
My brother shook his head.
‘She’s not worth it, man. Oh God.’
My brother looked at him again, paying new attention. He murmured, ‘You don’t talk about Baby.’
Baby’s ex started moaning. He swallowed some water, thrashed around for a moment. Then, lifting his face and staring directly at us, he kicked in our direction, desperately dragging his body to one of the beams supporting the walking path. He clutched the edge, then tried to lift himself up, his eyes wild and goggly. As soon as I saw him close up – the thick, straight hair, the snub face and buck teeth – I knew him, and I knew that I hated him. Jeers and catcalls wafted over through the mist. Thuan kicked at him but Baby’s ex grabbed his ankle. My brother tried to stomp him with his other leg but it was the injured one, and Baby’s ex clung on fiercely, fixedly. Hopping in a weird dance, my brother took a handful of his wet hair in one hand, raised the meat cleaver in the other. He looked at it. Then he looked at me and there was an odd new uncertainty in his expression. I drank in that look. It fed my heart roar, my blood rapids. I was filled with strange rage and I wanted to be as big as my feeling. I accepted the meat cleaver from my brother’s outstretched hand, fell down in a swift crouch, the ground rearing up at my shins, and felt my arm go back and then forward, the blade biting into the wet jacket, and when Baby’s ex released my brother’s foot and hung on to the path’s edge, I worked the blade at his fingers until they too let go.
They drifted, in a weakening, wordless flurry, back out to the middle of the river. At one point the river raised the legs of the brother, and he lay on his back, head bent forward, looking at the evidence of his body as though in disbelief. To this day people wonder why they didn’t swim a few more metres to the west, where they might easily have held onto a leg or abutment of the railway bridge. Or back eastward, to the Church Street bridge. Further east yet, they could have struck out for Herring Island, accessible only by water, and made sanctuary there. As it happened, they stayed in the deep middle of the Yarra. They were drunk, injured, freezing, one asthmatic and unable to swim, and after some desperate horseplay and muffled splashing their eyes went loose and their bodies calm, as though their feet had finally found a shelf in the water, and then they sank, their bodies spinning in slow dark minutes of motion, and they did not re-emerge until two days later when the police divers dragged them out.
My brother bent down at the path’s edge. The new silence rendered the brothers’ moments-ago breathing clotted and monstrous in its memory. Thuan took off his shoes, dipped them into the slow-moving river, then took them out and wrung the blood and water out of them. He dipped them in, took them out, and wrung them again. Our shoulders touched and pushed off each other as we ran back to the car.
*
‘What else do you say?’
‘I talk about revenge. Honour. Loyalty and betrayal.’
‘That’s all bullshit too.’
‘Not to me it isn’t.’
‘Wouldn’t you rather just forget everything?’
‘I wouldn’t change a thing.’
‘More bullshit. This is what you want? This life?’
‘I’d do it again.’
‘Why?’
‘For you. Because you couldn’t. Because you wanted to.’
‘I didn’t know what I wanted. It was stupid. Jesus, it’s easy for you to say.’
‘No it’s not.’
‘You didn’t cop the twelve years.’
‘That’s why you came back?’
‘No.’
‘To rub that in my face?’
‘No.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Actually.’
‘I would’ve done that, I would’ve copped it.’
‘Actually, I came back to ask for your forgiveness.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me.’
‘You don’t have to. I told you I’d do it again.’
‘That’s what I mean. I’m sorry I made you that way.’
*
The next morning he was gone. In hot February my brother came back to me, and stayed for only two nights and one day. I haven’t seen him since. My life, such as it is, I owe to him. If guilt is for what you’ve done and shame for who you are, then how could I feel shame? I was a brother, and my brother’s brother. Forget, he tells me, but does he taste them in his tap water, the savour of their hair and skin in his herbs? They too were brothers. Melbourne’s in drought. The city a plain of dust and fire. The river hasn’t water enough to wash the foreign matter out.
I have my work, and my garden, my mother in her glassy loneliness to attend. I have my mornings. Who knows if he’ll come back? I have my dreams, too, which have come to seem coextensive with my memories. My sleep is shallow, and my dreams never seem to go all the way down. I step out of my night window and the river wipes the field before me, a smear of silver noise, the great fishes climbing the water by the plate-glass glint of their eyes, in their indigo and orange glows, mastering the dark. I am underneath, plunging as the grey scrim of surface blackens above me. Breathe, lungs, and let me time. We live our lives atop the body of emotion of which we’re capable. I follow my dim thought-embryos, I see by my feeling, I sink with my words, for words are shadow, and shadow cannot explain light.
Where’ve you been.
You started a thought and you could end up anywhere. Like watching a fire: its false grabs and reachings, its licks and twists, you stared into the guts of it and came out in the nightlight glow of a shared childhood room, the cheap groan of a bunk bed, you’re awake and listening to the breath snagging in your brother’s nostrils, the low whistle of his open-mouthed sleep, the insideness of his life and its promise of protection from the harmful world outside.
Where’ve you been. You’re late.
He’s dragging a suitcase into the street. He makes it all the way out of the driveway, to the cherry tree, before I stop him. The air is full of pollen and sunscreen. He emerges from the concrete tunnel with a rueful smile on his face. He’s bent over me on the couch – he rooted in his terrible motion and I in him.
I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.
I bite the red cushion. I feel his ribs on my ribs. My body an anvil and he’s beating something upon it, shaping it into a truer shape, seeking to prove it, the strength, the ductility, the temper of his love.
Brothers and Sisters