Where There's Smoke

by Black Inc.

  ‘I never want to see you again,’ my brother abruptly shouted into the night. ‘Take your stuff and get out of here!’

  With a wicked smile she turned in our direction. ‘I’m never coming back!’ she called out. She heaved the suitcase into the boot and slammed it shut.

  Something occurs to me from my childhood I haven’t thought about for years. After a particularly nasty beating, if I swore to tell our parents – and his bribes and proofs of contrition weren’t enough to dissuade me – my brother would threaten to run away. How strange that I now remember this with something like nostalgia. He would stalk to the closet and take out a suitcase and then he’d start packing it, leaving me mute-stricken as I tagged helplessly and furiously behind him, horrified by the thought of being responsible for his loss – and, far more deeply, of losing him. I’d break, of course, and agree to anything if only he agreed to stay. Was this what it was to love somebody? I guessed it had to be.

  A few weeks after my brother’s open-air tryst with Baby, we received word that the Ngo brothers had been ambushed at the casino. The crew from that nightclub fight was responsible; they’d driven all the way in, we later learned, from Sunshine. The youngest Ngo, Peter, had had two of his ribs broken with a cricket bat. They’d been out with the Footscray crew from the same fight – the one with Baby’s red-capped ex – with whom they’d since become mates. Straight away there was talk of revenge, and soon enough there was another fight, at another Asian night, when Red Cap recognised one of the Sunshine boys. This time, knives were produced, and two people cut.

  To Thuan and me, none of this, in itself, seemed critical. These fights happened all the time without ever reaching the hospitals, let alone the courts or headlines. The Ngos were known hot-heads. And everyone accepted that the club scene was booby-trapped with grudges and grievances, blood ties and vendettas and bonds of blind loyalty. Asian nights had been banned in Sydney for exactly this reason. The shock of what followed in this case lay mostly in the speed and savagery of its escalation. Afterwards, there was a fair bit of carry-on about who could have done what, when, to whom, to excite such action – but I’ll confess that, as irrational and unfair as it may sound, and though it can’t really be said to have presaged anything, as soon as Baby looked up that cool night, and commanded my eye, and showed me how dangerous her desire was, how matter-of-fact her recklessness – I knew right then I could no longer be shocked by anything that touched her.

  For Thuan it was already too late. First, it emerged that she’d been in contact with Red Cap, her ex, all along – that in fact he was her on-again off-again dealer. I saw my brother’s face when he found out, felt the shock and deep retreat as though it were my own. He broke it off with her. She contacted me and pleaded her innocence. She was crying, and had never looked more beautiful. It was over, she said; she’d been clean the whole time, she said, and, still believing her, I passed it on. They reconciled. I was wracked with strong ambivalence seeing, even momentarily, my brother so vulnerable. A week later, a friend of mine spotted Baby in Sunshine with her other ex – the one who’d picked the first fight with my brother. I confronted her. At first she denied it, then she stopped short. It was impossible to go anywhere in a Vietnamese enclave without being noted – she understood that.

  ‘Okay,’ she sighed. ‘I went there.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘I heard …’ She paused, reconsidered. ‘Him and his mates are planning an attack. A big one.’

  ‘On who?’

  ‘Johnny. My ex. And all the rest of his friends. Your friends too – the brothers.’

  We were in her car, on our way to pick Thuan up from somewhere, and she spoke straight ahead, into the busy windscreen.

  ‘You know this? You gotta tell them.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She frowned, chewed at her lower lip. ‘I know him. He just wants to be the big man. That’s all it was, I just went there to ask him to stop all this.’

  ‘What’d he say?’

  She glanced over at me, and there was a small, strange crease around her eyes I hadn’t seen before.

  ‘He said he’d think about it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She drove on a while, then, as though resolving some internal question, she swung her head from side to side. ‘Big T, he wanted me to beg.’

  All my life I’ve been told I’m not very good at reading people. There is, I think, some truth to this. Baby, in particular, was so changeable that any attempt would usually be offside and out of step. But in that moment, I was inspired by an intense insight to say nothing, to sit still and let her ravelled thinking tease itself out. In my concentration my face must have lapsed into a frown.

  She looked over, cringed slightly. ‘I guess you already know,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Do you wanna pull over? Talk about this?’

  ‘I would love that.’

  She pulled into a petrol station and parked by the air pump. Again, I waited for her to speak.

  ‘You’re sweet,’ she said nervously. She tilted the rear-view mirror down and checked her face. Then she told me how, when she’d gone back to plead with her ex, one thing had led to another. Not like that. But she still wasn’t sure how it had happened.

  ‘What happened?’

  She paused. ‘I don’t want your brother to think I’m a slut.’ Her voice was small but quickly hardening. ‘That’s what he called me last time.’

  We sat in silence as the car ticked. Slut. The word led me to the image of her bent over a wobbling suitcase, pants scrunched down to her knees. Sand and salt on her wet skin. The lie of the bikini on her body.

  ‘Yeah but you did fuck him, didn’t you?’ I could feel my heart throttling my ribs as I thought this, and then, unbelievably – as I said it. Now the new word – the new image it called up – landed heavy and wet between us.

  Baby jutted out her jaw. She jerked her head in my direction but didn’t look at me. ‘You can’t … Look, it’s not like I’m going out with you.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You can’t talk to me like that.’

  ‘Right. It’s not like he’s my brother. Like the last time you fucked around, who was it that patched everything up for you?’

  She inhaled sharply. She said, ‘I screwed up.’ Then she turned to me, her face gone cunning. ‘But what’s the deal with you two anyway? What sort of fucked-up thing is that?’ Her skin was clenched tight around the eyes, her jaw muscles working her thoughts. ‘I don’t even know why he lets you follow him around. Almost like he’s scared of you or something. Like you’ve got something on him – the way you’ve got something on me – ‘cos that’s what you do, right, Big T? Spy on everyone? Get all the dirt?’

  As she spoke, the space inside the hatchback seemed to shrink. It was as though everything real, dimensional, was happening here, inside, while the windows were actually screens broadcasting a program of outside movement and colour. In this enclosure I became acutely aware of her smell – sweat from where her body had kneaded the seat, the chemical tang of her shampoo.

  Without thinking I reached for her.

  She flinched. ‘I’m sorry,’ she coughed, then, somewhat unsteadily, she undid her seatbelt, leaned forward, and peeled her cardigan off. I realised her cheeks were wet. I didn’t know what I wanted. ‘Sorry,’ she repeated, and offered both her naked arms to me. She was sobbing now, quietly. And then I saw what it was she was trying to show me. The two dark mottled bands around her wrist, and two more around her biceps. The bruises yellow and orange and green, and myself enraptured and repulsed by them. The rot and ripe of them. Most strangely, I felt myself powerfully flushed with a sense that I only much later recognised – and ultimately accepted – as betrayal.

  I told my brother a friend had seen her go into the ex’s house. I told him to ask her himself. I told him – thinking he’d be happy to hear it – that this ex was gearing up for a major attack against the Footscray crew. I told him m
y source was unimpeachable.

  *

  The afternoon, finally, is cooling down when Thuan returns. He catches me half-naked in the kitchen. ‘I’ve washed up in plenty of kitchen sinks,’ he assures me. He’s carrying a slab of Carlton Bitter under one arm and holding a supermarket bag in the other. ‘Meat,’ he explains, ‘for the barbie.’

  ‘Where’d you go?’

  He ignores me, sets the bag down, rips a couple of cans out of their tight plastic trap. When he throws me a beer I realise it’s exactly what I feel like. The rest of the cans he tips into an esky. By silent consensus we head outside and sit on the deck. Through the gums and melaleucas, the thick pelt of scrub and sedge along its banks, the river is light brown, slow, milky. This river that famously flows upside down. The day’s heat hangs in the air but is no longer suffocating. The brightness no longer angry. We finish the beers, and then the next ones, and the next. I hadn’t realised how thirsty I was. He tells me he walked along the river, up to the falls. He saw kayakers there, rehearsing their moves, and uni students doing water tests. He stops, losing interest in his own story. I picture the concrete-capped, rubbish-choked weir, the graffitied basalt boulders, all dominated by the Eastern Freeway roaring overhead. I wonder whether it brought to his mind another river – the same river – running beside and below a different freeway. I wonder whether, when he stares out at this river now, he connects it to that other river a few Ks dead south of here; if he follows it, in his mind’s eye, through its windings and loops, through Collingwood, and Abbotsford, and Richmond, and Burnley – to South Yarra.

  He throws me another beer. The barbeque is all but forgotten. I’m getting a bit dreamy with alcohol, my mind draggling in the heat.

  ‘So what’s going on with you anyway?’

  ‘What?’ I say, even though I heard him. I have no idea why I said this. I start to audition sentences to make my answer over but this only affirms the silence. My brother snorts, then hoists his drink in a wry toast. I skol my can, stand up and torpedo it into the bush. I’ll pick it up later. A pair of rowers glance at us from the river and wave.

  ‘Jesus,’ my brother says, ‘I really screwed her up.’

  ‘Nothing you could have done. She was on edge the whole time.’ After my last chance, I’m now eager to speak. ‘Probably junk too. And those friends of hers – in Footscray.’ ‘What?’ His brow creases. ‘Nah, I meant Mum.’ He looks at me curiously for a second, then scoffs at himself. ‘Though her too, I guess.’

  I recall a story Baby told me during her last visit, how a friend of hers in detention had collapsed from withdrawal; the male guards had grabbed her, double-cuffed her, stuck a motorbike helmet on her head for two days so she couldn’t ‘hurt herself.’

  ‘Mum still going up to that temple?’

  He’d come back from jail and I’d fantasised about receiving his confidences. He’d copped the time for both of us – knowing, surely, that I would’ve done the same. But he hadn’t grown more open at all. Nor the couple of other times he’d visited. Only this time seemed different. This was the most communicative I’d ever seen him.

  ‘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.