Where There's Smoke (3 page)

‘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.