‘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 h
er 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.
When it gets light my brother showers and heads out. I laze on the couch in the living room, windows open but curtains drawn, shirtless in front of the rickety fan, rolling a chilled glass bottle of water back and forth across my chest. Otherwise, I try not to move. When the phone rings, it’s Mum—one of her friends has just spotted Thuan on Victoria Street. Is it true? Has he come back?
I’m waiting for him when he returns. We have to go visit Mum, I tell him. He stops, then nods, puts his sunnies back on. Outside, the air is so hot it immediately dries out my lungs; I can feel the bitumen boiling through my sandals. This is a killing sun. We walk south, through the Abbotsford chop shops and factories, the streets made slow, strange with heat vapour, the sudden assaultive glare of metal surfaces. People move, then pause in scant shadows. On the main street the tramlines look as though they’re liquefying. Too hot to think, let alone speak, we make our way towards the high-rise flats.
‘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, shrill 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 close my eyes again, coach those voices at the bottom of my hearing to sing louder, bear higher their meaning.
Brothers and Sisters Page 15