Brothers and Sisters (10 page)

I knew that I had done the right thing by not telling. These were the important things; never to ask for explanations, never to talk about what we did. My brother and I shared a room. In the months after I was born, my brother had tried to bury me. He would scour the room for objects that he could pile into my cot: toys, clothes, footwear.

Later, he usually ignored me, but there were moments when he didn’t. My mother told him off once for carefully laying a packet full of drawing-pins, points upwards, in my bed. She said that it was his responsibility to look after me, that we only had each other.

My brother’s violence often came unexpectedly. He would turn with a sudden blankness in his eyes and punch me in the arms and the stomach and chest. Sometimes I would scream so that our stepfather would come in and hit us both, but often I kept quiet and so did he. I had seen my brother fighting at school. He beat people quickly and efficiently, no matter how much bigger or stronger they were, and while they were still nursing bloody noses, he’d be off doing something else, smiling like the whole thing had never happened.

It was the same with me. Not long after his attacks, he would come strolling back into view, preoccupied with something else, a pleasant grin on his face when he glanced in my direction. His whole expression would dazzle me, invite me to forget, and I would find it impossible to maintain my fury. But in the days that I spent alone with my father, I started to see the smile differently.

Towards the end of my stay, I bought a record with my father’s money. He had been giving me money the whole time as if neither of us really knew what else we should be doing together. I bought Queen’s
Greatest Hits
and played it full blast in his tidy, strangely empty house. He listened tolerantly the whole way through and watched with a kind of curiosity bordering on affection as I played air guitar.

Martin was there too, doing his endless repetitions of push-ups against the wall. When the last song finished, Phytos told me suddenly that he still cared about my mother, despite everything, despite what he had lost. Showing his perfect teeth, he said that she was a lovely person but just unstable, prone to imagining things that weren’t there—or, he added with a confident glance at Martin, things that had never happened.

When I returned to Australia, it was the height of summer. My brother didn’t ask much about Phytos. He had always seemed slightly bored by our father and his only disappointment appeared to be that he’d missed out on seeing his old friends. At first I couldn’t bring myself to talk about the trip at all, but then things began to loosen inside me.

‘Phytos says nothing happened,’ I told my brother a few weeks after my return.

At first I thought he hadn’t heard me. We were sitting on the couch. My brother was watching the cricket. He could sit in front of the television for hours when the cricket was on, and his face would grow empty and still.

‘What do you mean?’ he asked at last, without looking away from the television.

‘Between you and him. He says Mum made it all up.’

My brother laughed but he didn’t say anything. I mentioned seeing my friend Martin with Phytos quite a bit although I didn’t say what we’d watched together.

‘Yeah,’ my brother said. ‘Some of the guys on my soccer team used to hang at his house too. Even when I wasn’t around.’

He turned and gave me a brief smile. He had a way of smiling without showing his teeth that had nothing to do with putting on charm.

By this stage, my father had phoned up a couple of times. The next time he phoned, my brother asked to speak to him.

‘Phytos.’ My brother spoke softly into the phone. He listened for a moment then said, ‘I hate your fucking guts. You’re a coward. Don’t call here again.’

He put down the phone and went into his room. He came out with his spearfishing gear.

‘It’s blowing a westerly,’ he said. ‘Bet you the water’s dead flat.’

I had been watching him jump off rocks into the sea for years. I would stand on the shore and glimpse him way out and alone in the turbulence of the sea and my stomach would churn. Dolphins dipped and cut through the water much closer to the shore than he was.

The first time he took me out spearfishing was during that summer. We plunged off the rocks and started paddling; out, it seemed, towards the tankers on the horizon. We paddled for twenty minutes, way past the shark nets. I couldn’t see the bottom; only islands of shadow and strange turns of light, and fish, longer than my arms, that slid past as if I didn’t exist.

Every now and again, my brother kicked down into the gloom and left me drifting above him in a cloud of bubbles. Alone, at the surface, I shivered and choked at each watery breath in my snorkel until I saw him rising towards me. Often, the carcass of a fish hung from his spear. He nearly always managed to shoot fish in the eye. When he was nearby, I would lift my head and stare back at the thin ribbon of the shoreline and yearn for it, but the thought of paddling back alone filled me with terror.

By the time we returned to shore, I couldn’t feel my hands or feet and my teeth chattered so fiercely that I thought they would shatter. I asked him whether he ever got scared out there by himself.

‘No,’ he told me.

‘What do you think of when you’re out there?’

He showed his teeth. ‘Nothing. Just the fish.’

My brother was by this time sixteen years old, well proportioned, and broad-shouldered. My own limbs were longer and felt strange to me. His short, dark hair was tousled and rough with salt water. There was often a subtle but intent scowl on his face that sat like a wall in front of whatever I imagined that he was thinking. He crouched with one knee on the rocks and opened the belly of each of his fish with a practised motion. He tossed fistfuls of guts to the seagulls that wheeled and descended around us.

Staring back over the blue drape of the ocean, he remarked that he was impressed how I had stayed out with him for nearly two hours. He had come prepared, in a thick rubber wetsuit, while I wore only my swimmers. I had never heard him say that to me before, that he was
impressed
with me. I didn’t tell him the truth.

I have this dream sometimes, that I am small and standing at a door. The door is orange and it has a window above it. Through this window, which is slanted open, I can hear my brother and my father. I am outside the door. They are playing a game on the other side. I am calling out, trying to get their attention, but the door remains closed.

My brother often sold me his old clothes. He would dangle them in front of me and offer them at a price. There was never any negotiation. If I refused to pay the price, he threw them out with a mocking, regretful expression. I bought many of his clothes but they never sat on me properly. I was taller than him, but skinnier, and his clothes were already worn by the time they got to me, so that I looked like a lost scarecrow. I rarely saw myself wearing them though. I made a point of not looking at myself. Instead I focused on the way I had seen my brother wear them, the ease with which he moved inside his skin. I was fascinated by his surface.

All of my brother’s friends used to call me by his name. They added
junior
at the end as if I were his son, and so I was known, but apart from the history we shared, I was more aware of our difference. My brother had a broad Australian accent that he had acquired within a year or so of our arrival, and he blended in at school in every way. My own accent still carried the thick, stumbling textures of Holland. I was much taller than the people around me and solitary.

My brother could pick up any sort of sporting equipment and act like he had been using it for years and he had an easy contempt for those who didn’t have that natural ability.

When he was eighteen he said to me, ‘Have you ever actually stopped to
look
at yourself?’

There was such derision in his tone that I flew into a rage. I described in great detail how he had always put me down, how he had oppressed me, made my life hell despite the fact that I had only ever admired him. He turned white, as if all of this was news to him. After that, he’d sometimes find ways of praising me. He’d tell me that I was better with words than he was, that I was the clever one.

I was used to admiring my brother because it was all that I had ever seen other people do. On the last day of my trip to Holland, when my father drove my mother and me back to the airport, Phytos began discussing with a feverish kind of enthusiasm the possibility of seeing my brother the next time.

Suddenly Mum said, ‘Mike has all these wonderful qualities that you’ve just never seen.’

‘Oh look,’ Phytos said after a moment of silence, ‘I guess I just never really noticed them because he’s so different to me.’

‘Different how?’

‘You know, sensitive, fragile. A bit like . . .’

‘Me?’

‘Maybe, maybe,’ he said.

He added, with his peculiar foreign manner of phrase, that my brother was easier to love because he was more in his own image. The unabashed way in which he said this while I sat in the car with him struck me with a kind of awe. I don’t remember how this conversation ended, but it was dark and trees shot up from the flat landscape like spears into the smoky grey sky.

My father hugged me at the airport and I kissed his cheek. Despite how I felt about him, the well-kept surface, with its hint of stubble and a sophisticated whiff of aftershave, evoked in me a distilled sort of happiness, and I remembered how seeing my father when I was a kid in Holland had meant the headlong rush into a most wonderful and seductive feeling of potential.

My mother and I got on the plane and sat side by side, in silence. The plane taxied along the runway. There was a low, dull smother of clouds pressing on the landscape, making it vague, and rain sliced across the narrow window beside me. The plane turned and paused. Then it jolted forward and raced along the tarmac with a fierce shudder. Grey filled the window and then tore away to reveal a dazzling, clear sky. It was surprising to see that sky, to remember that it existed.

In the toilet at the pub, I stare in the mirror set into the gleaming white tiles, direct a frothy stream of piss into the urinal, and weigh my romantic potential. Chest hair shows at the unbuttoned juncture of my shirt. I follow my brother’s advice; I draw on my inner Greek. I have no idea what that means though. I have no memory of the places my father came from, and only a few memories of him. For me it has always been guesswork.

I make my way back into the crowded bar and return to the place where I left my brother and his girlfriend and Anna. My brother has just been on a diving trip to Fiji and talk has turned to sharks.

‘I hate swimming in the ocean,’ Anna says, ‘because I always think of sharks.’

‘I’d bet you’d feel safe with me,’ I tell her when the bustle of the pub separates us momentarily from the others.

Her eyes dart into mine and she looks away.

I take her hand and move in close. ‘I’d love to kiss you right now.’

Anna uses my hands to gently leverage me away.

‘You shouldn’t,’ she says. ‘I’m not attracted to you at all. I’m sorry.’