Brothers and Sisters (23 page)

I get up and wash my face. The water from the cold faucet is warm, and smells of dirt. Downstairs, a reflexive propriety forestalls me looking at the sleeping form on the couch, and then I look. My brother, Thuan, comes bringing no clues where he’s been. As always, he lies on his back. His mouth is open, his eyelids violent with their shuddered thoughts, and under the thin sheet I can see the heavy limbs, flat and parallel as though lying in state. He has a powerful body.

I make some coffee in a plunger—not bothering to keep the noise down—and take it outside to the back deck. Surrounded by cicada song I sit down, stare out. Something is wrong. Why else would he have come? I wonder where he’s been but then why does it matter? Away’s where he’s been. I think of his last visit three years ago, then Baby’s visit a few months later—how quiet and uncertain she was, how unlike his girlfriend from those rowdier times. Before leaving she hesitated, then asked for thirty dollars; I gave it to her and never saw her again.

Against the darkness, other faces from that shared past occur to my mind with stunning vividness. Even closer, thicker, than the dark is the heat. Another scorcher on the way. Somewhere out there a forest is burning, and a family crouching under wet towels in a bathtub, waiting as their green lungs fill with steam and soot muck. I test the coffee’s temperature. As often happens at this time of morning I find myself in a strange sleep-bleared funk that’s not quite sadness. It’s not quite anything. Through the trees below, the river sucks in the lambency of city, creeps it back up the bank, and slowly, in this way, as I have seen and cherished it for years, the darkness reacquaints itself into new morning.

He’s there now, I sense him, but I say nothing. Minutes pass. A line of second lightness rises into view beside the river: the bike trail.

‘You still got my old t-shirt,’ Thuan says. Even his voice sounds humid. He comes out, barefoot and bare-chested, stepping around my punching bag without even feinting assault.

‘Sleep okay?’

‘If you mean did I drown in my own sweat.’

He’s feeling talkative. ‘You came in late,’ I say. ‘There’s a fan.’

He pads around the deck, inspecting it. Since he was last here I’ve jerry-rigged a small workout area, a tarpaulin overhang. I painted the concrete underfoot in bright, now faded, colours. He lowers himself onto the flat bench. Then under his breath he says, ‘Alright,’ as though sceptically conceding a point. He shakes his head. ‘This bloody drought,’ he says.

‘I know, I’ve been going down there,’ I say, nodding at the river. ‘Bringing water up—for the garden and whatnot.’

‘Why?’

‘You know.’ He’s making me self-conscious. ‘The herbs and stuff.’

‘I mean why not just use the hose?’

I glance at him. Where has he been that there aren’t water restrictions? Then I catch his meaning: who cared about the water restrictions? What could they do to you?

A shyness takes hold of me, then I say, ‘I dreamt about Saturday sports.’

To my surprise he starts laughing. He lifts up his face, already sweat-glossed, and bares his mouth widely. Yes, he’s changed since I saw him last. ‘Remember when you broke that guy’s leg? And they wanted us to forfeit?’

I tell him I remember, though in my memory it was he, and not I, who had done the leg breaking. We’d played on the same team some years. For a confusing moment I’m shuttled back into my morning’s dream: the brittle sky, the sun a pale yolk broken across it. Then the specific memory finds me—the specific faces—the injured kid with what seemed an expression of short-breathed delight, as if someone had just told a hugely off-colour joke; the odd, elsewhere smirk playing on our father’s lips as he came onto the field to collect us, batting off the coach’s earnest officialese, the rising rancour of the opposing parents.

‘The look on his face,’ I scoff.

I wait for Thuan to go on with the story but apparently he’s done. He’s chuckling still, but the sound has no teeth in it and that makes me wary. I feel oddly tested by him.

‘Coffee?’

He thinks about it. Then, as though shoved, he falls backwards along the bench, twisting his upper body at the last second beneath the barbell. Hurriedly I count up the weight—one-twenty kilos on a fifteen-kilo bar—not shameful, but nor is it my PB.

‘Wanna spot?’ I ask, making it clear from my tone that I’m joking.

He jerks the bar off the stand and correctly, easily, completes three presses. When he’s done he remains on his back, arms gone loose on either side of the narrow bench as though parodying one of the weekend kayakers on the river below. I follow his long breaths. For some time he doesn’t move or speak, and in the half-dark I wonder if it’s possible he’s fallen back asleep. All around us the cicadas beat on, their timbre unsteady, deranged by the interminable heat of the night. I settle back too. A strong whiff of sage from the garden. Trees and bushes sliding into their outlines. Buying this place when I came into my inheritance was the smartest thing I ever did—despite its rundown state, subsiding foundations, the light-industrial mills and factories on every side. I couldn’t have known then that ten years on, at thirty-three, I’d be living here alone, jobless. I couldn’t have reasoned that I’d end up folding each of my days into this early-morning mood, trained on the dark river below, sensing that the mood, though ineffable, was one less of sorrow than of loss—and that what I called my life would be answerable to it. I know this: my brother, when he comes, muddies this mood in me. For this I am glad, as for the fact that we are bound to each other in all the ways that matter.

As though invoked, he speaks up. ‘I’ll be out of your hair in a couple of days,’ he says. Then he gets up and goes into the dark bushes, presumably to take a piss.

Physical excellence has always been important between us. As a boy, I remember pushing myself in sports because my brother did— following him blindly into school and street games of every type. Unlike me, he didn’t read, or even listen to music; for him the pursuit of physical betterment was its own reason and reward. I remember witnessing—when I was eleven and he thirteen—a push-up contest between my brother and the four Ngo boys. Later, of course, the four of them would be media-tarred as members of that night’s notorious ‘Asian gang’ but in truth they were no gang—they were barely even friends—and famously never on speaking terms. What they were, were brothers. And even back then, in the kids’ room at some family friends’ party in St Albans, squatting around the prone figure of my brother who was younger than all but one of them, they’d already learned to stick together. The contest carried on. With no clear winner emerging, they progressed to push-ups on their knuckles, then push-ups on five fingertips, then one-armed push-ups incorporating these variants—the Ngos dropping out until only Hai, the eldest, remained alongside my brother. Then Hai collapsed. All of us watched in incredulity as Thuan went on to demonstrate a one-armed push-up, left hand tightly clutching his right wrist, where his body’s weight was borne entirely by the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. I was stricken—as much by my brother’s single-mindedness as his strength, the fact he must have practised, in secret, for months. (I say this with confidence because it was only after three months, when I’d buffed two coin-sized spots into the bathroom floorboard, that I managed it myself.)

My brother believed that nothing could make you ridiculous if you were strong. His way was to go at things directly; entering a new school, for example, he would do what movie lore says to do upon entering jail: pick a fight—and win. I wondered what he did in jail. Our father, in his own way, failed to beat this into us, and so my brother beat it into me. I thought then I hated him for it but I was wrong. I wanted to know him—I always have. Now I realise it was only when he asserted himself in physical motion—then, ineluctably, in violence—that I came closest to doing so.

I am on the street of my childhood. I am running late, without any time to scavenge through the disused paddock, veer in and out from under lawn sprinklers—even to catch a breather at the bottom of our steep hill. He’s by himself, waiting for me. Both our parents at work. I’m late, and when I come in the front door he’ll punish me—those are his rules, and they’re clear enough. I come in and there he is, right in front of me, his face almost unbearably inscrutable. He allows me time to put down my schoolbag and deadlock the door. I fumble off my shoes. The hot cord bunches up from my gut into my throat, clogging my breathing. I lift my arms to my face and he slubs me with a big backhander.

‘Where’ve you been. You’re late.’

I nod, lick my cracked lips, crabwalk quickly into the living room. He follows me to the couch where I hunch my back and bury my face in the dark red cushion. Over and over he hits me, his knuckles pounding the hard part of my head where I won’t bruise. The cushion smells of old blood, and spit, and sweat from both our bodies. If I reach behind to feel for the arm, the punishing fist—try to glove it with my own smaller, sweaty palms—he’ll twist and sprain my fingers.

If I turn to plead, I’ll meet his face absent of heavy intent, as if his attention is somewhere else, as if he’s bashing my skull to reach something just beyond it. He’s utterly without pity and in my stronger moments I envy that. I’m sorry, I tell him. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. He drives his knee into my lower back. At the height of panic and pain something comes free in me. Afterwards, I wipe my face on the cushion and try not to track blood, if there is blood, all over the carpet. I search my reflection in the bathroom mirror. If there’s visible damage, he’ll barter with me, he’ll let me off next time, he’ll do my chores, buy me jam doughnuts at the tuckshop—so long as I don’t dob him in. But only rarely are there visible signs.

‘What happened?’ Mum asks. She’s had a long day and her face is closed and loose.

‘Nothing.’

She pauses. ‘I’ll tell your dad.’

I look at her scornfully. Even she knows that doesn’t deserve an answer.

One of the common tacks in media accounts of my brother, I noticed—beyond the routine designation of ‘monster’—was to call attention to his inscrutability. None of the other culprits merited such consideration. The Ngo boys, for instance, always looked thug–gishly guilty. But courtroom reporters and sketch artists described, artfully and self-consciously, their failure of scrutiny in the face of Thuan Xuan Nguyen; a face typically depicted as ‘smooth’, or ‘mask-like’, on someone whose very name rebuffed pronunciation in each of its three syllables. I could understand their frustration. My brother was a person in whom deep faults ran, yet always he seemed to conduct them into something like charisma. All my life I never judged him; to me he represented the fulfilment of my own genomic seed and tatter. I never suspected, after all that happened, at the trial and beyond, that complete strangers might also be capable of my reservation. This is not to defend what he did. This is to say I understood, completely, the media’s macabre, manic insistence on the details of that night. The facts of the matter. The altercation and eviction from the nightclub. The first victim chased down and hacked to death by a gang wielding machetes, meat cleavers and samurai swords. The sickening count of wounds on his body. Victims two and three fleeing into the Yarra, carried by the water approximately two hundred metres to the west—shadowed alongshore by the gang. One with gashes on his wrists and forearms, three fingers missing below the knuckle, from a presumed attempt to return to shore. Chances are you may recall these details. The sober-faced riverside TV reports, the strongly worded declarations by members of the mayor’s office, the Homicide Squad, the Asian Squad—while in the wintry background, day on day, the grieving families held vigil, wailing in Vietnamese as they proffered incense sticks, lit and let go of tissue paper. You may have even heard me speak, in one of my presentations, about this incident. Most people recognise my brother only through one of his tabloid nicknames: the Meat Cleaver Murderer. He was there on the bank that night. Here’s what most people won’t know—what I’ve never spoken about: I was there with him.