by Black Inc.
‘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.
My brother bent down at the path’s edge. The new silence rendered the brothers’ moments-ago breathing clotted and monstrous in its memory. Thuan took off his shoes, dipped them into the slow-moving river, then took them out and wrung the blood and water out
of them. He dipped them in, took them out, and wrung them again. Our shoulders touched and pushed off each other as we ran back to the car.
*
‘What else do you say?’
‘I talk about revenge. Honour. Loyalty and betrayal.’
‘That’s all bullshit too.’
‘Not to me it isn’t.’
‘Wouldn’t you rather just forget everything?’
‘I wouldn’t change a thing.’
‘More bullshit. This is what you want? This life?’
‘I’d do it again.’
‘Why?’
‘For you. Because you couldn’t. Because you wanted to.’
‘I didn’t know what I wanted. It was stupid. Jesus, it’s easy for you to say.’
‘No it’s not.’
‘You didn’t cop the twelve years.’
‘That’s why you came back?’
‘No.’
‘To rub that in my face?’
‘No.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Actually.’
‘I would’ve done that, I would’ve copped it.’
‘Actually, I came back to ask for your forgiveness.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me.’
‘You don’t have to. I told you I’d do it again.’
‘That’s what I mean. I’m sorry I made you that way.’
*
The next morning he was gone. In hot February my brother came back to me, and stayed for only two nights and one day. I haven’t seen him since. My life, such as it is, I owe to him. If guilt is for what you’ve done and shame for who you are, then how could I feel shame? I was a brother, and my brother’s brother. Forget, he tells me, but does he taste them in his tap water, the savour of their hair and skin in his herbs? They too were brothers. Melbourne’s in drought. The city a plain of dust and fire. The river hasn’t water enough to wash the foreign matter out.
I have my work, and my garden, my mother in her glassy loneliness to attend. I have my mornings. Who knows if he’ll come back? I have my dreams, too, which have come to seem coextensive with my memories. My sleep is shallow, and my dreams never seem to go all the way down. I step out of my night window and the river wipes the field before me, a smear of silver noise, the great fishes climbing the water by the plate-glass glint of their eyes, in their indigo and orange glows, mastering the dark. I am underneath, plunging as the grey scrim of surface blackens above me. Breathe, lungs, and let me time. We live our lives atop the body of emotion of which we’re capable. I follow my dim thought-embryos, I see by my feeling, I sink with my words, for words are shadow, and shadow cannot explain light.
Where’ve you been.
You started a thought and you could end up anywhere. Like watching a fire: its false grabs and reachings, its licks and twists, you stared into the guts of it and came out in the nightlight glow of a shared childhood room, the cheap groan of a bunk bed, you’re awake and listening to the breath snagging in your brother’s nostrils, the low whistle of his open-mouthed sleep, the insideness of his life and its promise of protection from the harmful world outside.
Where’ve you been. You’re late.
He’s dragging a suitcase into the street. He makes it all the way out of the driveway, to the cherry tree, before I stop him. The air is full of pollen and sunscreen. He emerges from the concrete tunnel with a rueful smile on his face. He’s bent over me on the couch – he rooted in his terrible motion and I in him.
I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.
I bite the red cushion. I feel his ribs on my ribs. My body an anvil and he’s beating something upon it, shaping it into a truer shape, seeking to prove it, the strength, the ductility, the temper of his love.
SILENCE 1945
RODNEY HALL
A man jumped up on the horizon. Quite suddenly he jumped up where nobody had been before. A soldier, with nothing on his head to protect it. In the afternoon. Behind him mushrooming clouds gathered. And above the clouds three parachutes seemed fixed in the sky. The big guns had already fallen silent and every last aircraft had long since flown away. It was on a ridge above some straight shadows that were the enemy trenches. And up he jumped.
And there was one who asked: Do we shoot him, Sergeant Potts?
But Sergeant Potts just spat. On the ground. Because this was something no one could account for; a soldier making a target of himself in full view of the platoon of hidden men in helmets, each one of us with his finger on the trigger and a question in his eyes. Each homesick from too much bitterness and loss. And too much fear felt too soon. Boy soldiers, rookies, with no idea what to do next.
Someone whispered: It must be a trick.
Or else a lunatic, another whispered back and opened the wound of a grin in his face.
Another asked: What will they chuck at us next?
But Sergeant Potts poked around under the rim of his helmet and scratched his skull.
All because a man jumped up where nobody had been before. Quite suddenly, dark and small in the afternoon, with nothing to protect his head and only clouds beyond. And three parachutists fixed in the sky while we hid, watching him, a platoon of boys in baggy uniforms, with no idea what to do. And this man, who was our enemy, lifted wooden arms. Slow as a broken windmill he started signalling. One letter at a time he spelt a message in semaphore: ICH HABE HUNGER.
AS A WOMAN GROWS OLDER
J. M. COETZEE
She is visiting her daughter in Nice, her first visit there in years. Her son will fly out from the United States to spend a few days with them, on the way to some conference or other. It interests her, this confluence of dates. She wonders whether there has not been some collusion, whether the two of them do not have some plan, some proposal to put to her of the kind that children put to a parent when they feel she can no longer look after herself. So obstinate, they will have said to each other: so obstinate, so stubborn, so self-willed – how will we get past that obstinacy of hers except by working together?
They love her, of course, else they would not be cooking up plans for her. Nevertheless, she does feel like one of those Roman aristocrats waiting to be handed the fatal draft, waiting to be told in the most confiding, the most sympathetic of ways that for the general good one should drink it down without a fuss.
Her children are and always have been good, dutiful, as children go. Whether as a mother she has been equally good and dutiful is another matter. But in this life we do not always get what we deserve. Her children will have to wait for another life, another incarnation, if they want the score to be evened.
Her daughter runs an art gallery in Nice. Her daughter is, by now, for all practical purposes French. Her son, with his American wife and American children, will soon, for all practical purposes, be American. So, having flown the nest, they have flown far. One might even think, did one not know better, that they have flown far to get away from her.
Whatever proposal it is they have to put to her, it is sure to be full of ambivalence: love and solicitude on the one hand, brisk heartlessness on the other, and a wish to see the end of her. Well, ambivalence should not disconcert her. She has made a living out of ambivalence. Where would the art of fiction be if there were no double meanings? What would life itself be if there were only heads or tails and nothing in between?
*
‘What I find eerie, as I grow older,’ she tells her son, ‘is that I hear issuing from my lips words I once upon a time used to hear old people say and swore I would never say myself. What-is-the-world-coming-to things. For example: no one seems any longer to be aware that the verb “may” has a past tense – what is the world coming to? People walk down the street eating pizza and talking into a telephone – what is the world coming to?’
It is his first day in Nice, her third: a clear, warm June day, the kind of day that brought idle, well-to-do people from England to this stretch of coast in the first place. And behold, here they are, the two of them, strolling down the Prom
enade des Anglais just as the English did a hundred years ago with their parasols and their boaters, deploring Mr Hardy’s latest effort, deploring the Boers.
‘Deplore,’ she says: ‘a word one does not hear much nowadays. No one with any sense deplores, not unless they want to be a figure of fun. An interdicted word, an interdicted activity. So what is one to do? Does one keep them all pent up, one’s deplorations, until one is alone with other old folk and free to spill them?’
‘You can deplore to me as much as you like, Mother,’ says John, her good and dutiful son. ‘I will nod sympathetically and not make fun of you. What else would you like to deplore today besides pizza?’
‘It is not pizza that I deplore, pizza is well and good in its place, it is walking and eating and talking all at the same time that I find so rude.’
‘I agree, it is rude or at least unrefined. What else?’
‘That’s enough. What I deplore is in itself of no interest. What is of interest is that I vowed years ago I would never do it, and here I am doing it. Why have I succumbed? I deplore what the world is coming to. I deplore the course of history. From my heart I deplore it. Yet when I listen to myself, what do I hear? I hear my mother deploring the miniskirt, deploring the electric guitar. And I remember my exasperation. “Yes, Mother,” I would say, and grind my teeth and pray for her to shut up. And so …’
‘And so you think I am grinding my teeth and praying for you to shut up.’
‘Yes.’
‘I am not. It is perfectly acceptable to deplore what the world is coming to. I deplore it myself, in private.’
‘But the detail, John, the detail! It is not just the grand sweep of history that I deplore, it is the detail – bad manners, bad grammar, loudness! It is details like that that exasperate me, and it is the kind of detail that exasperates me that drives me to despair. So unimportant! Do you understand? But of course you do not. You think I am making fun of myself when I am not making fun of myself. It is all serious! Do you understand that it could all be serious?’