Brothers & Sisters (9 page)

It reminds me of my father, who had that same youthful expression even when the wave of hair on his head was dead white and years of smoking had pulled his skin into an ashen mask around the angles of his cheeks.

We are standing together in a pub. My brother holds his drink in front of him like the host of some cocktail party, and his other hand is draped across the shoulders of his girlfriend. His girlfriend is pretty and polished, with glossy brown hair that shivers around her shoulders when she laughs. I have already noticed that she looks a lot more at my brother than he does at her.

My brother cocks his head, flashes his boyish grin at me and says, ‘I hope you haven’t portrayed me as some sort of monster.’

The first clear memory I have of watching him, my brother and I are not alone. He is kicking a ball, juggling it from one foot to the other. He does this effortlessly. I am watching him and my father at the same time. We are in the park. There is a naturalness to my brother’s movements that fills me with wonder. The ball looks as if it will never hit the ground. My father smokes a cigarette and stares at my brother as a pillar of ash lengthens on his cigarette. His mahogany eyes burn with an intensity that disappears when they turn my way.

In the pub, I am wearing a shirt that my brother gave me, and though I am skinnier than him, it strains across my chest. He stands there with his girlfriend and I sit on a barstool across from him. Another girl with a restless gaze and silky bob of dark hair sits beside me. Her name is Anna.

‘I feel like we are being watched,’ she tells me.

‘We are, but who cares.’

Anna’s glance stabs my way, but I don’t know how to read it. I have never been good at that sort of thing. I feel as if I am waiting on the starting block and I don’t know what to do with my body.

My brother suddenly steps close. ‘Mate, you need to loosen up a little.’

He says it loud, with that relaxed, boyish grin on his face. He undoes the top button of my shirt, and then the next one. ‘We have to bring out the Greek in you.’

A song comes on and he begins dancing. It’s a parody of dance but he doesn’t let go of the sexiness entirely. In the last few years, his features have shifted, as if an invisible river is wearing down the angles of his nose and cheeks, but his body is trim and black hair glistens at the opening of his shirt. His broad shoulders roll through the music. His girlfriend is giggling. My brother grins playfully as he dances but something is missing in the pose. I see not so much a boy, as a man pretending to be a boy. That too is something I remember of my father.

I am the last one to have seen my father, and that was more than twenty years ago. At the time, my mother had bargained him into paying for my ticket back to Holland, which we had left some years earlier, and where he still lived. He wanted to see my brother because he was the oldest and this mattered in Greek tradition, but my mother insisted that he should see me first.

My mother won her battle, but it was an uncomfortable victory. My father was the reason we had come to Australia. But in a strange country, married to a man that she didn’t love, my mother had grown homesick, and back then, she still had an overwhelming faith in the ability of people to change. ‘I can’t forget,’ she told us once, ‘that I used to love him very deeply. And, despite everything, he will always be your father.’

We disembarked at the airport in the middle of winter and my father picked me up while my mother went to stay with my grandmother. My father had changed a great deal since I had left Holland, physically at least. He looked skinnier than I remembered, less substantial. The colour had leached from his olive skin and his hair, black in my memory, now loomed above his forehead like an enormous drift of snow.

Something else had changed. I had always called him Daddy as a boy, not because I thought of him as my father but because I thought that was his name. But now I could only call him by his real name, the name that my mother used when she spoke of him in a tone of both sorrow and caution. I called him Phytos.

On the drive to his house I sat in the front seat, staring out at the flat landscape drenched in grey light, and it occurred to me that I had never been in the front seat of his car before. I was sitting in my brother’s place. After a long silence, Phytos told me that I looked like my mother.

Despite the cold, he drove with the car window down. A cigarette dangled from his lips, and smoke trailed from the wide, high arches of his nostrils. Phytos glanced at me again and I thought he was going to tell me something funny.

‘I have a surprise for you,’ he said.

When we got to his house, it turned out that the surprise was an old friend of mine, someone I had been a cub scout with as a boy. The two of us had made a pile of trouble once by going out of bounds during a camp. We had climbed into the attic of the building where we were staying and I had fallen through the roof. The boy’s name was Martin. He was fourteen now, only a year ahead of me, but he seemed much older.

Martin had lank blond hair and a thin, corded neck. He pulled a cigarette from the packet that my father offered, lit it, and showed me a really neat trick. He drew deep and exhaled into a tissue. Revealing the yellowish brown nicotine stain on the inside of the tissue, he told me with a cynical grin that this was why you shouldn’t smoke. He and my father chuckled like war veterans and they both pulled on their cigarettes.

Martin did karate. He was eager to demonstrate his training regime. He jerked his body through an elaborate series of moves and then showed me how to do short, sharp push-ups against a wall. Lots of repetitions, he told me, that was how you got speed in your punches. He did a hundred of those push-ups every day. His arms were milky, lean pillars of muscle. We all sat around a table and arm-wrestled. He could beat Phytos easily, but then so could I.

‘You’re growing up,’ Phytos told me in his oddly pitched English, still saturated with the Greek, ‘turning into a real man, an
animal
!’

I remembered that he used to call my brother an animal. I smiled back at him and didn’t say how surprised I was at his physical weakness. I had always imagined him as handsome, but there was a sunken quality to his face, particularly around his eye sockets, despite the brightness in his gaze.

Still breathing hard from his karate moves, Martin lit up another cigarette and turned to Phytos. ‘You should show Mike your videos.’

Phytos raised his eyebrows. ‘I think he’s a bit young for that sort of thing, aren’t you, Michael?’

‘I’m not too young at all,’ I said quickly.

‘Come on,’ Martin urged. ‘He can look away if he doesn’t like it.’

‘What would your mother think?’ Phytos stared at me with a gaze as smooth and polished as wood, his mouth hooked at one end as if we were sharing a private joke.

I told him that I didn’t care what my mother thought. She was far away, and I was a man now.

‘Just remember that a
man
doesn’t have to tell his mother everything,’ he said as he put on the video.

I sat on the couch beside Martin. The movie was foreign. I guessed that they were speaking German. We watched a woman in a nurse’s uniform put her hand inside another woman’s vagina.

‘Look at that.’ Martin leaned into his crossed arms and tensed his fists so that veins rose into the pale skin. ‘Yeah, give it to her.’

‘Don’t get ash on my couch,’ Phytos said, touching his head.

He put an ashtray beside Martin and kept on tidying the house, making sure that it was as clean and carefully ordered as the moment I had walked in. All of the walls were white. There were no pictures. The neatness of the place was disrupted only by a plant that had outgrown its pot. Its tendrils, thick as femoral arteries, shot along the window frame and up to the ceiling, and its fleshy leaves dangled along the architraves.

‘You have the best dad,’ Martin said suddenly.

I watched him briefly, swallowing and drawing at the cigarette between his wet lips, exhaling smoke through his nose the way my father did, then my eyes pulled back towards the television. I had a hard-on. I was grinning and the muscles of my cheeks strained at my jaw. My heart shuddered against the bottom of my throat. Most of all, I felt a shameful relief that my brother couldn’t see me.

You’re too young.
This was something my brother said often when we were growing up. He said it once when we were standing beside a place shut off from the world by a tall barbed wire fence. Signs that said
Keep Out
and
Danger
hung along the fence, but my brother had found a slit cut into the wire and he held it open as he stared back at me. I told him what I always did, that I wasn’t too young at all, and he let me follow him.

I didn’t ask my brother what we were doing. I never did. We passed a shooting range, and long chains that looked like they were used to restrain dogs. Paths ran between oaks and pines and past concrete structures with locked metal doors. We came to a place where a huge old tree spread its branches beside a narrow road.

Nearby stood a building punctured by lights and I could see people moving around inside. I wanted to stay out of sight. A sea of tiny nuts lay around the tree facing us. My brother strolled forward, squatted in plain view and began eating them. He turned and looked at where I cowered in the bushes with a broad smile.

‘They taste good, Mike,’ he said.

I forgot everything and walked over to him. A man in an army uniform came riding past on a bike. When he saw us, he stumbled off his bike and ran towards us with a tight, focused expression. It was the kind of look that I’d seen on my stepfather’s face a hundred times. My brother was off. He yelled at me to run too. The man was surprisingly fast. When I felt his breath right behind me, I turned and tried to warn him off in a shrill tone. He seized me by the back of my shirt and carried me towards the building.

By the time my brother got home, it was dark outside and I sat at the dinner table with my mother and stepfather.

My stepfather shoved back his chair and looked him up and down. ‘Where have you been? What have you been up to?’

My stepfather was a large man, overweight, his hands stained with work and tar from the pipes he smoked. He had a way of standing right over us when he asked questions, his arms and shoulders locked as he waited for answers.

My brother glanced across at me. He had straight, dark hair and my father’s brown eyes that turned hard and flat in anger, though right now they were full of curiosity. He said that he’d lost me while we were out playing. My stepfather turned and I felt his gaze. We were eating sandwiches for dinner. I chewed on my sandwich and shrugged.

Later, as we lay on the separate levels of our bunk bed, I told my brother how I’d been made to sit in a room with fluorescent lights, a bunch of men in uniforms around me. The men had looked at me until I started crying. They had given me a glass of orange juice and a biscuit and told me never to come back.

‘I waited at the fence for hours,’ my brother said.

I thought that he’d pile abuse on me then for not having run quick enough, but he fell silent, and the silence grew long. It occurred to me suddenly that he was ashamed.