Where There's Smoke (5 page)

‘In Sunshine? I think so.' He doesn't react, so I go on, ‘I think once she ran into one of the families there. I heard one of them spat in her face.'

He nods absently. ‘And you? You okay?'

The side-stepped directness of his question stuns me. I saunter my arm out along the view. ‘What's not to be okay about?'

‘Listen,' he says. ‘Can I ask you something?'

‘What?'

‘That stuff Mum said about you doing talks.'

‘It's nothing. Just uni stuff.' I feel myself smirking. ‘They just need someone with slanty eyes who can speak in their language.'

‘What sort of stuff do you say?'

‘You know – just whatever they wanna hear.'

‘Like what?'

‘Like poverty, or language issues. Cultural marginalisation …'

‘They don't ask about what happened that night?'

‘You mean do I talk about you.'

He shakes his head impatiently. He's working himself up to something and it puts me on edge. ‘I mean, don't they ask why? Why I did it? I mean, isn't all the rest of it bullshit?'

‘Why
we
did it. I was there too.'

‘Yeah,' he says, visibly annoyed at having been interrupted. ‘You're right. I forget. I'm sorry.' I wait for him to go on but now I've mucked up his thinking. ‘It's all bullshit,' he says again, struggling to recall his argument, and out of some old fraternal deference I find myself looking away. I listen to the frogs gulping for air down by the rushes. The black ducks and reed warblers. My heart is beating harder and harder. I know, of course, what he's referring to – it's the same thing that brings him here each time, then each time strikes him silent: the mind-boggling bullshit of
me
, years on, still with nothing but time, still cashing in, ever more deeply, on
his
time. Those twelve bullshit years piled on the back of a single night's spur of the moment. That night, too, I'd felt the same sick, heady exhilaration talking to him like this – like we were friends.

‘You're shaking,' he had pointed out. We'd made it home and both showered; he'd scrubbed his face, I noticed, until it was bright pink. The corners of his temple lined with delicate blue veins.

‘I can't piss. My bladder feels heavy as, but nothing comes out.'

He'd frowned, then reached out and clutched my neck with one of his strong pink hands. I knew the strength of those hands. My stomach hitched. He didn't say anything, and at the physical contact I was shuddered back to our surreal, silent trip in the car; the fog descending upon the freeway canyons, the red blinking lights of radio towers blooming like blood corollas in the mist. The streets had sucked us through the city and shot us home.

‘If they come for us,' my brother had said to me.

‘No one saw us.'

‘You weren't there. If they come for us, you weren't there.'

‘Hai and Long and Quang saw me.'

‘No they didn't. I'll talk to them.'

‘What about you?'

‘No matter what they say – so-and-so saw you, so-and-so ratted you out. Don't listen to them. You weren't there.'

‘What about you?'

He patted my neck, then removed his hand. The absence was a freezing burn. He was my rough flesh, he was rooted in the same soil, his heart and brain fed by the same blood, and never before had I felt so needful of him. He stood up and abruptly grimaced, clutching his right knee. Then his face smoothed over again. ‘I don't think anyone who saw me will talk,' he said. ‘But it shouldn't take them long. To find out about the Ngos. And then me.'

‘You mean Baby?'

He nodded, then let out a short burst of air.

‘What?'

‘I'm not saying she'll talk,' he said.

‘She's the one who called me.'

To this day I remember how, when I told him this, he'd shaken his head and smiled. ‘I know,' he'd said, as though unexpectedly amused. ‘Everything always goes back to Baby.' Now it is summer, my brother sits with me on the deck of my own house and his face, sweaty and cooked well past pink, confirms itself in that same expression – bemused, sardonic, slightly otherwise occupied.

‘Listen to me,' he says. ‘I'm glad you didn't have to go down with me.' His tone is flat with finality. ‘That was the best thing that happened this whole mess.'

‘Okay.'

‘That was the opposite of bullshit.'

‘I'm sorry.'

He waves it off. The light is dimming now and he turns away, but not before I catch a brief tensile movement in his expression. There's a discipline holding his face together. I'm horrified by the sudden realisation that maybe he's lying to me. ‘But see,' he goes on, ‘what I mean is this. I was there, you were there. I don't remember hardly anything. I was off my head but still.' He pauses, perhaps suspicious of his own earnestness. Neither of us looks at the other. ‘Haven't you tried to think about it, why we did it, and you can't tell what's what?'

I decide, in the brief silence that follows, that he's not actually asking me this question.

‘What happened,' he goes on, ‘and what everyone else says that happened?'

My face has reverted to its little-brother mask – imploring his censure and contempt, his instruction.

‘You'd think you'd remember everything.'

I nod. I approximate a wry sound. Then I venture, ‘I do. I do remember.'

He stops to absorb this. Then slowly, and to my great relief, his face slides back into its ironic smile. ‘Well, you have to. Otherwise, who's gonna give those bloody speeches?'

*

That night. I remembered that night very clearly. I'd been at a different club. They'd all gone to Jade – another Asian night – and I hated Asian nights. Too many try-hards, too much attitude. I was in the toilets when I got the call. There was a guy next to me pissing with both hands in his pockets. It was one of the most intimidating things I'd ever seen. I was pretty buzzed by that time, and when I answered the phone, Baby's tinny laughing was of a piece with the cackling going on and off in one of the stalls, and then – out in the club – the DJ's chop to a bass-heavy loop, the dewy, overripe smell of teenage girls. I found a quieter corner so I could hear her.

‘Swords!' she was saying. Then I realised she wasn't laughing. ‘They've got fucking swords!'

Outside, it was drizzling. I ran down the road, past the shawled girls with clopping heels, the corners and culverts reeking of piss, the darkened power poles specked with staples. Overhead, the wet telephone wires gleamed completely gold in the streetlight, like charged filaments, even though my mind insisted on them as black, sheathed in black plastic. I reached the car, which I'd parked at a defunct petrol station – now just a low, flat, broken roof spewing water onto the oil-stained concrete. As soon as I stopped running, I vomited. I got in the car and caught my breath. I called Baby. She didn't answer. I called my brother.

‘Fuck,' he panted. ‘Fucking fuck.'

‘What happened? Where are you?'

He was running, his breath loud and jagged. The wind took his voice. There was no time to explain. He told me where to pick him up, down near the river. It was only a few minutes away.

I arrived at the corner of Church and Alexandra. Across the road from the brightly lit car dealership, human shapes were scampering in every direction. They were all guys, all Asians – some carrying glinting weapons and cudgels. I saw one pull down the beak of his baseball cap over his eyes. Not daring to stop, I slowed the car as I passed, made out what looked like a small pile of dirty clothes on the nature strip. Then I saw, pale and inverted, the telltale hand. There was no blood. The head must have been concealed by a piece of flapping fabric, or maybe the ground fell away. There was nothing to indicate a body that had been smashed and stabbed to bits, but even then I knew that was what I was looking at, and the knowledge rocked in my skull, riled up my blood.

I drove on a bit further and parked on the grassy shoulder, making sure to turn off the engine and lights. I took out my phone, my hands trembling, saw three missed calls from Baby. I tried her again but again no one answered. Then the phone rang. My brother. Where was I? I told him what I'd seen, we had to get the fuck out of there. Not yet. Where was I? Okay, I should meet him on the other side of the bridge. When? Now. Right now.

I got out of the car. The wind had picked up, gusting sideways on my face. I spat and could see my slag sail forever. Behind me the faux-gothic columns of Melbourne High School were upwardly lit. I crossed the road to the riverbank and ran along the bike path, under bare tree boughs creaking and contending in the wind. Some distance ahead of me, windows in condominium buildings glowed in what seemed secret patterns. I ran into the wind. A car bore down on me, its headlights tunnelling through the thickening fog, changing the shape of the road. It passed in a vicious swipe of noise. By the time I reached the body, which had been left strangely unattended, a veneer had been ripped away within me, an innate excuse brought full-blooded to life. I crossed the bridge.

My brother was three-quarters across. He wore an open-necked shirt as though it wasn't the heart of winter, and leaned against a lamp-lit column as though bored, as though waiting for a late tram. As soon as I reached him he spun around without a word and sprinted down some white-glowing stairs that led to the north bank of the river. There was another track down there, squeezed between the Monash Freeway on one side and the river on the other.

I can't tell you what it felt like, racing through the cold night with my brother. On our right the concrete-and-plastic freeway barricade flickering our progress, on our left the river, and beneath us the paved path springing our feet forward and fast. The wind kicking at our backs. At no point did I second guess what we were doing. I spent my life waiting for him to talk me into something and now the wash of adrenaline through my veins urged me on, faster and faster, as though to chase down, catch my own breath. A voice floated across the river. My brother slowed down, then stopped. His face haggard with exertion but steely, the set of his jaw exuberant.

I turned, breathing heavily, towards the voice. Under the high moon, the river was a trough of light and it was difficult to see behind it. Then I saw. There were two black shapes in the shine. In the darkness opposite there were three more shapes. I soon recognised their voices – the three elder Ngos. They spat and swore into the river.

‘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 side-stroked 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.