The day after annaliese came to my door for the first time, I met my brother Patrick for lunch at Harveys at New Farm.

I was five minutes late, he was five minutes later and came in flapping a mobile phone and some papers. I was sure it was just for effect. He was an important man in advertising, and people were hounding him with A4, phone calls, text messages. He was wearing a see-through camouflage mesh sleeveless top and three-quarter pants, and his jet black hair was gelled like a soft-serve ice-cream. He had no need to flap to catch my eye.

He saw me sizing him up and he scowled, or at least let a well-managed wrinkle or two cross his brow. His next look would be disdain – something he could communicate by instinct in a range of media – and it would coincide with a cursory scan of my inadequate dress sense, and lumbering body habitus.

‘I’m sorry, is it casual Friday at your work, or nipple Friday?’ I said as he sat down. Always beat your brother to the punch.

‘Chubs,’ he said, feigning hurt. It was his special name for me – I had never liked it and it had never been more true. ‘You can’t see them, can you?’ He pressed his shirt flat against his chest and looked down, his face now all mock-horror at his tanned brown nipples.

‘Well, you appear to have two nipple-sized, nipple-coloured things in the places where nipples might be, but feel free to seek a second opinion. Nice abs. That’s what I meant to say. Obviously.’

He picked up the laminated menu and tapped it on the glass table top. ‘Hey, I do a lot of crunches. These abs come at a price, and the price is extreme tedium. But they are nice abs. You’re right. Might as well share them with the team on casual Friday.’

He had said to me once that he had voted against casual Friday at the management meeting. He had told them there was no casual Friday in advertising. He had told them casual Friday was on the way out all over town. He had waved his arms around dramatically but not persuasively, forecast industry-wide ridicule if not doom. But the admin staff had asked for it specially, and it would cost nothing. So Fridays turned casual, and disdain found its wardrobe. Casual Friday would, for Patrick, become parody Friday, and he would buy clothes for it that would see no wear on the week’s other six days.

‘Well, I’m sure the team appreciates the effort,’ I said. ‘Those abs’d break rocks. That’s a lot of work you’ve put in with mardi gras still months away.’

He gave a flat, resigned smile and a sigh. ‘I don’t do mardi gras any more.’

He told me there came a time for us all when we realised we were past the mardi gras life, and it typically came around dawn as you staggered home through mascara-streaked drag queens tottering on crazy heels and the last of their chemicals, and shirtless hairless boys with plenty of gas in the tank, and you were dreaming of hours of good sleep somewhere clean and comfortable. You were old and uncool, in an instant, but it was what you were and you had no choice but to embrace it. Buy small dogs, stick to home, keep hours more like those of the styleless other world you’d spent your life backing away from. The world where your brother Chubs lived – that was his thought taken to its logical conclusion.

I was no rockstar to this man, not even a rockstar on hiatus. I was a slob who had once had a band, who had trespassed upon a cooler place, interviewed reluctantly and not well and always remained happier behind the scenes. He knew that about me. He knew I was not cool, and posters in their tens of thousands would never change that. And that was fine by me. I wasn’t cool. I had a liking for music, and it had taken me places.

Patrick was the creative director at the agency, and just back from shooting a clothing ad in Finland. They were not clothes he would ever deign to buy, but I was sure he had given them a good-looking ad.

One of the staff came over to take our order. She gave me a shaky smile, tidied a strand of red-dyed hair and said, in a rush, ‘Hi. Are you guys ready? I should get you some water.’ She stopped to renegotiate her breathing and her cheeks started to flush. ‘Assuming you’d like water.’

Patrick rolled his eyes. I started to tell her water would be great, but in the same moment Patrick let his menu hit the table with a slap and then he said, ‘I don’t know why I’m even looking. I practically live here. I know what I want.’

He ordered a salad without dressing. I ordered a pear and walnut salad with blue cheese dressing. And then I ordered sandcrab lasagna as well.

‘It’ll be my main meal of the day,’ I told him, and he gave me a look that spelled out that I wasn’t the only one who knew it to be a lie.

‘Great,’ the girl taking our order said, her voice gone a little squeaky. She cleared her throat, touched it with her hand and opened her eyes wider. ‘And drinks? Or just the water?’

Once she was out of earshot and he had stopped rolling his eyes again, Patrick leaned over the table to me and said, ‘And would you like a paper bag with that? Or would you just prefer to keep hyperventilating? There’ll be autographs before we leave this place, I just know it. All those bloody little girlie fans of yours.’

Disdain, disdain. Disdain for us all.

I was never going to persuade him that it was just my life, and not a life I’d chosen. I was in his world now – he was the Harveys regular, he should have been at least recognised and preferably fawned over. James Street was his street, all steel and glass and topiary, designer knickknacks, six kinds of bok choy and twelve of fish roe, sleek boxy Danish furniture, bars where people sat on authentic upturned wooden packing crates and chose from cellars of three hundred wines. I supposed there had been houses here once, wooden worker’s cottages, or light industry. But none of us knew, as the old James Street had made no mark on us.

The transformation, I could only assume, had been dramatic as it had passed from the calloused hands of sheet-metal workers and panel-beaters to a generation they could never have imagined. To Patrick and his partner, Blaine, to people whose sunglasses lasted a season and cost a grand, who loved to be the first to buy a new exotic ingredient, but tortured themselves over the food miles. Not that I thought Blaine would ever do that. Blaine had never been one to reflect enough, to care enough, to torture himself.

Blaine was square-jawed and difficult, and he tended to pick his opinions up flat-pack and erect them in a hurry, without much duty owed to the facts. Which was fine when he wanted to be the loudest person disparaging some new pinot gris, or grigio – I could recall that he thought he hated one and loved the other – but there had been one or two times when I had been more inclined to pick a fight.

Another staff member arrived with a bottle of water. At the table next to us, a woman with a dark bob and frameless glasses scanned some floor plans while the man she was sitting with leaned his forearms on his notes and thumbed his Blackberry. Behind him were chrome racks with bags of hand-made pasta, sachets of dukka, pots of tapenade.

Patrick’s phone jiggled on the table and he looked at it and said, ‘I’m sorry, I have to take this.’ He then browbeat the caller mildly and with some charm, and told them he’d be back in less than an hour – more than thirty minutes but less than an hour. ‘Showing me at three would be okay,’ he said, ‘if you think it’ll take you till three.’

He ended the call, pressed a button and watched his phone turn off, and put it in his pocket.

I asked him how his trip had been and he said, ‘Fine. We cut a hole in the ice. You know how it goes. Cheesy but effective.’ Then he shook off a little of his sardonic tone. ‘Actually it was good. We had a great time. We’ve got some good pictures and we stayed up till all hours sampling the Finlandia vodka range and then ran bare-arsed in the snow. So, maybe I should reserve the right to a mardi gras comeback at some stage.’

I didn’t know if he had truly run bare-arsed in the snow, and I wasn’t going to ask. I wasn’t going to enquire about the possible birching of his bare buttocks either, though it seemed like the next logical place to take it. He would assure me the night had gone there, and that it was just the thing for stimulating the circulation. We had enough decades behind us for me to know the trajectory of most of our conversations, even if there hadn’t been as many in recent years.

We swapped notes on our visits to Scandinavia, and the work we were doing. He told me he had ‘clients up to the wazoo’ and I said I assumed he was wearing mesh so that people could get a good look at his crammed wazoo and not approach him with new business. He said he was not wearing mesh there, but maybe next casual Friday he should give it some thought.

Our meals arrived, his a plate of leaves weighed down with a few spindly low-GI roast veges, mine a sizeable slab of gourmet lasagna and a well-dressed salad, competing and mingling savoury fragrances rising from it and making my salivary glands spasm.

He looked at my plate as though it was evidence of an entry-level war crime.

‘I don’t know how you can eat that with no dressing,’ I said, mustering some kind of pre-emptive strike. ‘I assume you shit little rabbity pellets.’

‘I have a family history of heart disease,’ he said, and I hated him for it in a brotherly way and wanted to throw his leaves in his face. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Stupid remark. I just wish ... I want you around, Chubs.’

He lanced some leaves with his fork. I cut a fat corner of lasagna and lifted it to my mouth.

‘I’m around,’ I said before posting it in there.

It had been a year and five months since our father had died of a heart attack in the early hours of the morning on the way from his bedroom to the bathroom. It was his third, and he had a seam down his chest from bypass surgery. I was fourteen when he had his operation, and fastidious management of his cholesterol and blood pressure had bought him another twenty years.

Patrick and I had played guessing games about who got which genes from where, as families do. For us it was harder than some. Patrick was inexplicably darker than the rest of us. We had both outgrown any resemblance the two of us had, though I had done so more literally, and we had no mother to measure ourselves against, since she had died when we were young. I was three, Patrick was seven. He went to her funeral but I didn’t, on the advice of a family friend who was a psychologist and said Patrick’s seven-year-old grieving needs would be different to mine.

I could remember our mother, but mostly I remembered her from photographs. As time passed and the world changed – but the photos didn’t – she became an abstract representation of the seventies to me. The photos stayed out on the coffee table and the bookcases and slowly grew pale, and Patrick touched them sometimes for luck, one after another. He spoke to them, and my father encouraged it.

She had a bike with a big basket with two flowers on it. That was one of the photos – her on her bike, no helmet, her hair being tossed around. She had flowing dresses, and preferred to go barefoot. She could pick things up with her toes – socks, pencils, Lego. She wore chunky wooden beads and I liked the texture. She sang in tune. I think I remember her singing Scarborough Fair. Like my father, she was a music teacher. She auditioned successfully for the state symphony orchestra as a flautist, and then she became sick. I knew that only from the chronology I’d learned. I couldn’t remember her sick and I couldn’t think of any flute music from my early life.

My father stayed in the house, a simple unrenovated Queenslander in an unfashionable part of town, and kept it as it was for the next thirty years.

It was a student and his mother who found him, at five minutes to ten on the first Monday of the school holidays. They had turned up for a private lesson, and saw the distorted shape of his body through the leadlight window glass of the front door. For years the prospect of my father’s death, instant and non-negotiable as it would be, had scared me. I had only one parent, and needed to keep him. But his failure to die for ten years and then fifteen, and the drift of his cardiology visits to six-monthly and then annual, had me complacent. His chest seam was an old scar by then, history, a story of a bullet dodged. So the news shocked me when it came.

Patrick kept himself fastidiously lean, his diet all pulses and other cardioflatulents. I appeared to have made other choices.

‘I can’t believe you live at Kenmore,’ he said through a mulch of rocket and bitter purple leaves. ‘All that money and you live at Kenmore.’

‘I’m on the Brookfield side of the road,’ I told him, though I knew where the suburb line lay and I was still in Kenmore by hundreds of metres.

‘Brookfield is Kenmore with ponies.’ There would be little slack cut for Brookfield.

‘This blue cheese dressing is amazing,’ I said. ‘You really should try some. Live a little.’