Brothers and Sisters (27 page)

‘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 sidestroked 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 tapwater, 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.

ONE GOOD
THING

Paddy O’Reilly

‘If you were my sister,’ I asked Klara Fuchs, ‘do you think we’d still be best friends?’

‘Oh, Natalie, of course we would,’ she said, and I believed her.

We were in love, the way that primary school girls fall in love with each other. When I look back now I realise that Klara was thin and brittle like a bunch of sticks held together with cloth. But at that time I thought she was perfect. She wore bright striped dresses that her mother had made, and matching single-colour cardigans. She wore long white socks every day. She smelled different to everyone else, sour and spicy like an exotic fruit. The first night I had tea at her house and they served me sauerkraut I recognised the smell. Sometimes, in school, we held hands under the desk. I remember the sensation of her hot sticky fingers entwined in mine.

I was an only child. Klara had a sister and a brother. Her sister was nine years older than us, almost an adult. She only ever spoke to us to point out how annoying we were. Klara’s brother, Dieter, was thirteen. As much as I wished Klara was my sister and could live with me at my house, I wished Dieter was not her brother and that I had never met him.

If Dieter found a drawing we had done, he ripped it up. If he caught us playing in the mud, he smeared the mud over our faces. At the swimming pool, he tried to hold us under. He might always be around a corner, so we had to speak softly. He might find the spell we had written to ward him off, so we ate the paper.

When I sat opposite him at the dinner table, smiling politely as I tried to chew my serve of sour cabbage and meaty sausage, Dieter watched me. He stared until my throat tightened and I couldn’t swallow. He seemed to hate me for no other reason than the fact I was sitting opposite him at the dining table and had caught his eye. Klara sat next to me, hardly letting anything pass her lips, as if Dieter was controlling her food intake. She carried herself in a hunch, and she shivered easily. The temperature only had to be slightly cool and Klara would start shivering. Or if her brother was nearby. Then she shivered too.

The times Dieter was around were the only times I wondered if I could keep on being Klara’s best friend.

One Sunday Klara’s mother and father took us on a trip to the Caribbean Gardens in a suburb a long drive away. Klara, me, Dieter and his friend from school. Fibreglass statues of animals rose out of dry garden beds like we were in a museum, and the sun beat down over acres of brown dirt and colourless rides and stalls selling hot jam doughnuts and sausages in batter. The parents set up at a picnic table with a tablecloth. They brought baskets out of the car boot filled with bottles of beer for them and cordial for us, parcels of meat in pastry and thick, heavy cake smelling of honey. At the table Klara’s father shook out a newspaper and held it in front of his face. Her mother stripped down to a pair of bathers, laid her towel on the dirt and settled down with a book and a sunhat.

‘Why don’t you go for a swim?’ she said to us, nodding in the direction of the Caribbean lake, a large body of muddy water a few hundred yards away. A paddle-steamer ploughed through the water on the far side. Klara and I wandered around the statues of elephants and giraffes and crocodiles. Further along the shore a replica submarine rose out of the dust like a grey dinosaur. Dieter was on the deck trying to climb the periscope. Klara saw what I was looking at and she took hold of my hand and tugged me in the opposite direction.

‘Let’s play over there,’ she said, pointing at a bare patch of earth further along the shore. I followed her and she picked up a big stick and started sketching something out on the ground.

‘What are we playing?’ I said.

Klara looked over my shoulder and whispered, ‘Nothing.’ She dropped the stick. She whispered again, ‘Let’s go and play over there,’ and she pointed even further away, out into the field where even her parents couldn’t see us.

‘Are we allowed to go that far?’ I asked. My parents would never let me wander that far. I glanced behind and saw Dieter coming towards us with his friend, red-faced and crying, staggering behind him.