The Last Thread

by Michael Sala

  NEWCASTLE

  8

  ‘He’s here,’ Con said.

  The car pulled into the driveway and we made our way down the stairs. I wasn’t sure whether to be happy or excited. I felt curious more than anything else. I had no idea what Con was thinking—I could never tell from the look on his face.

  Con and I stood out the front of the house. The car came to a halt. It was a hot afternoon, the beginning of a school holiday in spring. There was no wind. Patches of harbour shimmered between the buildings off to one side.

  We had moved to this part of the city recently with my mother and Simon. Our latest home was the top level of an old two-storey brick house overlooking the mall. From the windows of our living room you could see Stockton Beach, its dark fleck of a shipwreck marking the sand in the distance. Inside, the usual straw tiles covered dirty carpet. A fresh straw odour still filled every space. At one end, Con and I shared a bedroom, as we had for most of our childhoods, but we never would again after this. Soon my mother and Simon would buy a weatherboard cottage in Islington, near the industrial part of the harbour. My mother would no longer put down straw tiles and instead rip up the carpet and polish the wood underneath. When I moved next, it would be on my own. But that was still years away.

  My mother got out of the car first, her make-up messy, a complicated smile on her face. She opened the back door. There was a pause. Then a boy emerged and looked shyly in our direction. He was six years old, tall for his age, and lanky with light-coloured skin. His hair was a luminous blond. His strong forehead ended in eyebrows etching towards one another, and underneath that a fierce blue gaze. He already had a prominent chin, a broad nose and a mouth that locked into a compact sort of smile, though his lips were soft, and shaped, I realised, like our mother’s.

  ‘He’s turned into a little man,’ Con said.

  I didn’t say anything. Apart from that honeyed blaze of hair, Jonno immediately reminded me of his father, the man who had abducted him and vanished into Queensland three years earlier.

  Con stepped close and ruffled his hair. ‘Jonno,’ he said with much greater warmth and affection than I’d heard in his voice for a long time. ‘Hey, Jonno.’

  ‘Hug your brother,’ my mother said, looking at me. And I did.

  Jonno stayed for a week. Con took him rock fishing. They went out for a day, and I knew what Jonno was in for, the wind and the salt and the sun and the endless search for the perfect spot, and Con’s gaze always somewhere up ahead, until he caught the fish and gutted them on some rock.

  When it was my turn, I took him to the movies. We lived near the cinema, part way along the hill that rose up to the cathedral. Jonno and I walked down to the cinema together. We were companionable enough, but we had little to say to one another. We did not talk about his father or about the three years that had passed since Dirk had disappeared with him. He answered my questions economically. He did not ask any of his own. We watched the movie, and walked back in silence.

  Although I admitted this to no one, the truth was that I had not missed Jonno. He had left no gaping hole in my existence. I’d been affected by our mother’s grief at his disappearance, but not by my own. I had been too relieved when Dirk left—too absorbed in my own life, in pulling myself out of the gloom, in trying to get my stepfather out of my system. At school, the other children and teachers didn’t even know that I had a younger brother.

  They did not know about my stepfather either, though I would have nightmares about him and still had the habit of second-guessing the simplest movements of my body, as if he might emerge from nowhere to pick me up by the hair or give me an open-handed slap across the face. Een klap.

  Jonno didn’t stay with us long. Soon my mother was driving him back to the airport, to the plane that would carry him to Dirk, in Queensland. While he had been with us, our mother had been elevated by nervous energy. But when she came home without him, she went into her room, closed the door and cried until it was dark outside.

  She said that Jonno had cried too, when he was away from Con and me, when he was out of our sight. His reserve had collapsed at the airport, in departures, when the reality of leaving set in. He had not let go of our mother for a long time.

  ‘You’ll see us again soon,’ she told him.

  Jonno’s visits took place in holiday periods, four per year. Our mother always launched into these times with a tense, forced gaiety—she was determined to make a good holiday for Jonno and for all of us, as a family. Fights happened more easily. Our mother and Simon would argue more.

  I could see the tension building in her before Jonno arrived, as she went through all the details and paid for the tickets, and then the fervour with which she threw herself into cooking and planning and observing, constantly observing—to make sure that he was at least having a good time when he was there with us, that we were all functioning as a family should.

  A year after we started seeing Jonno again, when I was fourteen, an earthquake hit Newcastle. Buildings collapsed all over the city, people died, foundations cracked. The mall alongside the harbour withered. The hospital overlooking the sea split down to its core and decayed over the following years into a shell. A new hospital opened somewhere else inland. Eventually most of the shell was demolished and what remained was converted into luxury apartments. The old hospital is long gone now, and you would never know that this was the place where, decades ago, Jonno had been born.

  By the time the earthquake struck, we had left our house above the mall, the house from which it was possible to see the distant wreck of the Sygna and the wilderness that hid the airport where Jonno departed and arrived. Our mother and Simon had bought the cottage in Islington and began to renovate it. Con and I were given separate rooms, but whenever Jonno came, he stayed in mine, because we were closer in age.

  Jonno wanted the door open at night. And he wanted the light on in the corridor outside. I let him keep the door open, but I wasn’t happy about it. At his age, I’d been terrified of the dark. His father had made few allowances for me.

  Unlike Con, who always slept without even seeming to breathe, as if he’d abandoned his body, Jonno was a restless sleeper. He was much noisier asleep than awake. I’d constantly hear the creak and racket of the mattress springs, the snoring and grunting, and the way that he cried out, struggling against things I couldn’t see. He moaned a lot, deep in his throat, and ground his teeth. Sleep seemed to be one long nightmare for him.

  I still slept in the bunks that my brother and I had once shared, and they were mine to do with as I pleased. I’d pulled the bottom bunk out at a right angle to have a clear view of the ceiling.

  I insisted that Jonno sleep on the top, although I knew the bottom was better for him. He often fell out of bed and usually clambered back up without complaint. Some nights, though, I would wake to a heavy thump and see him sprawled unmoving in the shadows on the floor. I’d go back to sleep without bothering to wake him.

  Once, I came out of a dream to see him falling from his bed, floating down towards me through the moonlight, his slack limbs spread, like he was offering me an embrace. Without thinking, I lifted my feet, planted them in his stomach and guided him over my head to the floor. My timing must have been perfect—I hardly felt him at all—and I easily fell back into sleep. When I woke up in the morning, he was still there, on the floor, beside my bed.

  I didn’t feel sorry for him. When he wasn’t around, I barely gave him any thought at all. But I hated the effect Jonno had on my mother, on everyone, the way all that pain reared up in his wake, like stitches torn from a wound. I sometimes wished that she’d never hired the private detective to track Jonno down, that she’d left him out there as part of some sort of inevitable loss.

  ‘He’s your brother,’ our mother would say. ‘Don’t ever forget that. This family has to stick together.’

  Most of the history that Con and I shared was separate from Jonno. His life had begun much later than ours. He did not see what Dirk had
been like to us, nor did he understand the things that bound Con and I together. We could never have explained it to Jonno. We did not get along most of the time, Con and I, but there was a connection between us as impenetrable to outsiders as a foreign language. When we joked about Dirk, Jonno would not say anything.

  ‘Ah, good old Dirk,’ my brother would remark, slapping me on the shoulder. ‘Don’t you miss him? Remember how he used to throw spanners at us? He taught us everything we know about getting out of the way!’

  ‘And running.’ I pictured Dirk, a nail-riddled plank raised in his hand, cursing as he pursued Con down the street.

  Verdomme.

  The three of us rarely did activities together, but Con sometimes played cricket with us in the backyard, mocking the way I threw the ball while smoothly encouraging Jonno. Con always seemed like a natural-born father to me, maybe because I had to work so hard for his approval. Jonno laughed softly at his jokes, which usually came at my expense, or made his own sparse comments towards me in an instinctive echo of Dirk’s derisive humour. A shapeless dread would tug at my stomach when he did that, and Jonno became better at that commentary with each visit.

  It was only much later that I started wondering about the life that Jonno led during those early years, the way that it must have unfolded for him after Dirk disappeared with him. A boy, not yet three years old, on a road trip with his father. I can only imagine the small, childish conversations he might have had with Dirk on that long drive into Queensland, away from the rest of us, and the days and weeks that followed, when it became clear he wouldn’t be returning. Did he cry? Did his father call this weakness? I wonder whether Dirk ever offered him comfort.

  In Queensland, with the threat of murder–suicide covering his tracks, Dirk set about making a new life. He abandoned carpentry and began a degree in computing. He became a sought-after expert in information technology. Jonno spent a lot of his childhood alone. As he grew up in some Brisbane outer suburb, he learned to wash his own clothes and prepare his own food and entertain himself. He ate a lot, but he didn’t eat well—not like we did with our mother’s cooking. He wandered back and forth through his father’s house and watched a lot of television. He never told me more about his childhood than that.

  But in the hidden months between those visits that punctuated my adolescence, he started to grow much larger than other children. He gathered weight, so that each time I saw him, the change was more obvious; he filled more of the space between us. I don’t know the exact point when he became stronger than me. And in the departures lounge, after a few years, to my mother’s disquiet, he no longer cried when it was time to say goodbye. I have always felt the two were connected.

  ‘Seeing any girls?’ Con asks as we sit in the back of our mother’s Torana.

  ‘No,’ Jonno answers.

  ‘Come on,’ Con says with a wink and a winning flash of his teeth. ‘A handsome kid like you. Bet there’ve been a few girls. Are you holding out on me, your own brother?’

  A blush creeps into Jonno’s cheeks, and he stares out the window. But when he glances back, his eyes reveal nothing. Jonno is ten. Con is twenty. He is a man, and I am somewhere in between.

  It’s unbearably hot in the car. Con and I are shirtless, in our board shorts. Jonno is wearing baggy board shorts in a man’s size and two huge T-shirts that are stained under the armpits. We are going to the beach, and I know that he won’t take those shirts off, even when he goes in the water. Our knees are all pressed into one another. Jonno’s breath fills the back seat. His thighs are nearly as wide as mine.

  ‘Make sure you date a Greek girl,’ Con says, changing his voice, catching my eye, and I laugh.

  By the time Jonno was seventeen, he reminded me of a giant in a story I’d once read, who grew so large that in the end only the sea would support his weight.

  Gradually, it became harder for him to move. He started having to think about what chair he needed to sit in. The front passenger seat of any car became his without discussion, and the car would sag as he got in. Our mother worried about his weight but didn’t want to deny him the things that she had always given to us. Con and I hardly mentioned Jonno’s weight either, although it was always there, the thought of it, its practical application. By this time, he had stopped going fishing or snorkelling with Con, or to the movies with me.

  Con and I would walk down the street and he’d come behind at a glacial pace. People turned sometimes to watch him pass. Con and I were always thinking and talking and obsessing about women, while he said nothing.

  By the time he was a man, his thighs were as thick as my waist. When he travelled by plane, he booked two seats. When I stood beside him, I was reminded of how I used to feel around his father as a boy, insubstantial and light, like I might be blown away or broken by a stiff wind. Jonno’s immense size made me feel as if, despite all of those years, I had not grown up at all.

  But he was the first and only baby I’d ever held in my arms. I was seven. He was feather-light, as if the breeze might lift him, and bald as a Buddhist monk. As he learned to crawl and walk and form his first words, I remember how Dirk treated him differently. He never laid a hand on him, never raised his voice, never mocked him, but then I cannot forget that when Dirk disappeared into Queensland, it was Jonno that he abducted and threatened to kill, not me.

  When Jonno was a boy, I grabbed him once by the arm and punched as hard as I could, in the meat of his bicep. He had touched my things and broken something. He stared at me, his blue eyes unwavering, and ran off.

  When he was twenty-one he towered over me. We were standing together, waiting to go somewhere with our mother. I grabbed his hands in a playful imitation of wrestling. He applied an excruciating pressure and forced me to my knees. My wrists felt like twigs. His face, buried in the placid roundness of the fat, was marked by a slight smile, the eyes elsewhere, as if he didn’t know the strength in his grip.

  But when Jonno was a toddler, I used to lie in bed and fantasise about stabbing his father to death. I loved to go into the mad, thrusting detail, the ransacking of my knife into Dirk’s belly, the simple, honest labour of cutting off his head and throwing it down the stairs (my satisfaction in the dense, fleshy thud), clapping my hands, turning to our mother and saying, ‘There, it’s over.’

  As an adult, I have spoken to Dirk briefly a few times on the phone.

  ‘Hello,’ he says.

  ‘Hello, it’s Michael.’ I hesitate. ‘Is Jon there?’

  ‘No,’ Dirk says in a voice that is deeper than Jonno’s but not all that different. He is courteous and contained, as if we have never met in person. He doesn’t say my name. ‘I’ll get him to call you back.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I tell him.

  I put down the phone and notice the tightness in my lungs. The way my heart has decided to change its movement.

  Is that all?

  When I was thirty, Dirk drove Jonno to Newcastle to the house that I shared with my first wife and our newly born daughter. Dirk did not come in; he dropped Jonno nearby, then drove the car alongside the house very slowly before accelerating away down the street. Jonno and I stood there staring after him in silence.

  ‘That,’ Jonno said, ‘is just his idea of a joke.’

  Dirk stayed somewhere else in the city, in a hotel, but he had a camera, and, like a tourist, he visited the old suburbs in which we had once lived as a troubled family: Newcastle East, Hamilton, Carrington. I don’t know what he was looking for in those places. But I have gone back there, too.

  The first day Jonno stayed in my house, he sat on the sofa and stared down at my daughter over massive folded arms. His heels flung before him were like cracked stone. He had sores around his toes and ankles, sores that must have been caused by lack of circulation and the simple pressure of moving and supporting that weight. But after he had relaxed, he picked up my daughter a few times and lifted her to his gaze. She was calm in his hands, in the cradle of his fingers that were the width of her wrists.
My daughter was fascinated by Jonno’s largeness, his implacable patience, the distantly amused intelligence in his eyes.

  Jonno stayed at my house a few days, and then met his father somewhere else in the city and they drove back to Queensland. I can see the two of them in that car, filling the front of it with their breath and their bulk, re-enacting an older journey.

  After that, we talked mainly on the phone. We didn’t talk much about Jonno’s personal life. The closest we came was when we talked about his studies or the mother we tenuously shared, both of us holding a part that did not quite join. Mainly Jonno told me about movies or television shows that he had watched. He was an expert on every series out of America, and could discuss swathes of animation from Japan. He spoke of these things with breathy authority.

  He stayed up late into the nights. He didn’t need much sleep, he said. For a while he tried to lose weight by holding one side of a Hills hoist out in the backyard of his father’s house and walking around and around in circles.

  It makes me think of how I too spent a lot of time alone as a boy, always in motion, wandering aimlessly, losing myself in one way or another. I walked everywhere across Newcastle. I have a clear memory of walking once along the expanse of Bar Beach car park. I was fourteen. It was bright, sunny. The car park was like an enormous shovel tilted and poised above the sea. I walked to the edge of the cliff and stared out at the water. Someone called out to me. I turned. A man was running towards me, his face a mask of alarm.

  ‘Did you feel that?’ he asked. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Feel what?’ I asked.

  This was the earthquake in 1989 that did so much damage in the city. That is my memory of it: that I did not feel it at all.