by Michael Sala
Let him do the lying.
Despite the separateness of our lives, my brother and I shared a room for most of our childhoods. On the whole, I would have been terrified of sleeping alone, but it was still an uneasy coexistence. I grew up knowing the story of how, in the months after I was born, he had tried to bury me. He would scour the room for objects that he could pile into my cot: toys, clothes, footwear.
Later, he usually ignored me, but there were moments when he didn’t. My mother told him off once for arranging a packet’s worth of thumbtacks in my bed. With an attention to detail that he rarely displayed elsewhere, he had laid the tacks out carefully with the points facing up and draped the bedsheet over them. My mother discovered them when she put me to bed. She told him that it was his responsibility to look after me, that we only had each other.
My brother’s violence often came unexpectedly. It never stayed on the surface long. When he fought other people, he beat them quickly and efficiently, no matter how much bigger or stronger they were, and while they were still nursing bloody noses he’d be off doing something else, smiling like the whole thing had never happened.
In the same way, not long after his attacks on me, he would come strolling back into view, preoccupied with something else, a pleasant grin on his face when he glanced in my direction. His whole expression would dazzle me, invite me to forget, to share the joke, to get into the present where he lived his life, and I would find it impossible to maintain my fury. But during the time I spent alone with my father, far away from my brother, I started seeing that smile differently.
~
Despite my father’s efforts, my stay with him did not turn out well. A week earlier than planned, he drove me to my aunt’s house to reunite me with my mother. We hardly spoke on that trip. He stopped along the way for a cake. It was a piece of art: a large, circular structure of pastry brimming with dark, pitted cherries and dusted with icing sugar. When we arrived, he smiled, held the cake aloft in one hand, and stepped over the threshold into my aunt’s house. He was welcome there. My aunt couldn’t stop gushing over the cake and nearly everyone was full of admiration. It was as if they were welcoming a long-lost friend.
The only one in the house that didn’t seem impressed with his arrival was my mother. I sensed that she was having some kind of ongoing argument with my aunt—a fat, jolly woman ten years older who had always played something of the role of a mother to her. My aunt was boisterous and could shove a joking comment into any conversation. It was hard not to be charmed by her even when she was thrusting an opinion down your throat.
One of the things I overheard her saying was, ‘Come on now, regardless of what did or didn’t happen, a boy deserves to know his father.’
When my father and I had stopped for the cake, we had gone into a mall and window-shopped for a while, and had an argument that simmered for hours afterwards. I had wanted him to buy me a samurai sword. The blade was wavy hammered steel, and it had a glossy black scabbard inlaid with fake gold flowers and images of tigers and dragons. I’d developed a fascination for swords ever since I’d watched Conan the Barbarian as a six-year-old. I used to draw them obsessively. I’d imagine using them on my stepfather in all sorts of elaborate scenarios. Andreas said no to the sword because he was becoming used to my asking for things and growing tired of it. And I was upset because I was becoming used to getting what I wanted from him.
And while this dynamic disturbed me, I couldn’t stop. I didn’t know why I was asking him for things all the time. I was thirteen, had begun working after school back at home, and knew what it was like to earn my own possessions. But I had discovered a sort of power over Andreas. He was offering me things with a subdued, domestic urgency, fussing over me in a way that leant him an air of fallibility. Or apology. Or guilt. He was constantly checking to see if I had what I wanted, doing it in a way that both irritated me and brought out my predatory instinct. He had ignored me for most of my life; I wanted to take him for all he was worth.
And then I told him that I wanted to leave his house a week early because I missed my mother and wanted to spend some time with my cousins. Andreas was hurt, though I think he was also relieved because no matter what he bought me I didn’t seem to be satisfied or happy. I didn’t tell him the real reason that I wanted to leave. I think he probably knew.
At one point towards the end of my stay with him, he gave me money to buy a record. I bought Queen’s Greatest Hits and put it on at full blast in his house. He listened tolerantly the whole way through. He watched me with a kind of curiosity bordering on affection as I played air guitar to ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’. Max was there, doing his endless push-ups against the wall.
When the song finished, Andreas smiled and told me suddenly that he still cared about my mother. He said that she was a lovely person, but just unstable, prone to imagining things that weren’t there. Or, he added with a confident glance towards Max, things that had never happened.
It was then that I made up my mind about him.
On the last day of the trip to Holland, Andreas reappeared with his car and drove my mother and I back to the airport. Everyone except my mother said that it was a lovely and generous gesture, because he lived on the other side of the country and had driven three hours to get to us. My mother reluctantly accepted my father’s help and thanked him in a stilted sort of way. By then, I think my mother regretted giving in to her feelings of longing and coming back to Holland, and involving my father with it all.
It was strange being in the back of my father’s car, watching the two of them in front, as if I had tumbled into some alternate future where they were still together. Andreas began discussing with a feverish kind of enthusiasm the possibility of seeing my brother the next time Mum came to Holland. He wanted to know everything about him: what he was doing, what his ambitions were, whether he had a girlfriend yet.
Andreas had always been fascinated by my brother’s love-life. The distance to the airport shrank in the silence of the early morning outside. I imagined my brother sitting in the front seat instead of my mother. I was quiet, brooding on the strange things that had happened during my time with my father. My mother must have thought that I was quiet for an entirely different reason.
All of a sudden, she said, ‘Mike has all these wonderful qualities that you’ve just never seen. How could you not see them?’
‘Look,’ Andreas said, ‘I guess I just never really noticed them because he’s so different to me.’
‘Different, how?’
‘You know, sensitive, fragile. A bit like…’
‘Me?’
‘Maybe, maybe,’ he said. He then added, with his peculiar foreign manner of phrase, that my brother was easier to love.
‘Why?’ my mother asked.
‘He’s more in my—how do I put it?—image.’
The unabashed way in which he said this while I sat in the car with him struck me with a kind of awe. I don’t remember how this conversation ended. It was getting lighter and trees shot up from the flat landscape like spearheads into the smoky sky.
Andreas hugged me at the airport and I kissed the cheek he offered. The well-kept surface, with its hint of stubble and a sophisticated aftershave whiff, still evoked in me an instinctive admiration, and a distilled sort of happiness, and I remembered how seeing my father when I was a kid for our brief times together had meant the headlong rush into a most wonderful and seductive feeling of potential. But that was nostalgia, and my real feelings meant now that I didn’t look back at him as we walked away.
I would never see him again, in the flesh. My mother and I got on the plane and sat together in silence. Relief was all that I could feel. The plane taxied along the runway. Grey pressed on the flat landscape, making it vague, and rain sliced across the narrow window beside me. The plane turned and paused. Then it jolted forward and raced along the tarmac with a shudder. Ash-coloured cloud filled the window, then tore away to reveal a dazzling, clear sky, a sun as bright and fierce as
any summer’s day in Australia. It was surprising to see that sky, to remember that it existed, far from the weight of winter and the detail of the ground.
~
Now I am studying my face in a mirror and thinking of him as I direct a frothy stream of piss into the urinal beneath it. I am trying to be objective, weighing my seductive potential. Chest hair shows at the unbuttoned juncture of my shirt. I try to give myself a charming smile. I do what my brother has told me: I draw on my inner Greek. I have no idea what that means. I don’t know a word of Greek. And I don’t know the place that my father came from. Con sometimes pretends to know, but his memories are the memories of a child.
Cyprus, my mother used to tell me, was the island upon which Aphrodite, the goddess of love, first set foot. It’s a romantic story until you learn that Aphrodite was born from the castrated genitals of her father.
I make my way back into the crowded bar and return to the place where my brother is holding court. He’s just been on a diving trip to Fiji and talk has turned to sharks. I try to mirror his ease, and slide my way next to the girl.
‘I hate swimming in the ocean,’ she says, ‘because I always think of sharks.’
‘I’d bet you’d feel fine if you went with me,’ I tell her when the bustle of the pub separates us momentarily from the others.
Her eyes dart around the room. I lean towards her. She uses my hands to gently leverage me away.
‘Don’t,’ she says.
I slump back on my chair, half relieved, and the noise of the pub presses around me. She gives a slight shrug, gets to her feet and goes off with my brother’s girlfriend to the toilet. With his girlfriend gone, my brother’s demeanour changes. His gaze moves across the women in the pub with a hungry intensity before it comes to rest on me. He looks at me for a moment as if he doesn’t recognise me, then his gaze clears.
‘How’s it going, Mike?’
‘I’m lonely.’
‘Ah, I know the feeling.’ He exudes a sudden melancholic air. ‘Me too. Yeah. God. I’m still in love with Monika. Do you remember how good we were together? I’m going to Sweden on my next holiday, and I’ll see if I can give her one last shot.’
‘Aren’t you in love with your actual girlfriend?’
His lips press inwards and his face softens into that desolate place. ‘Almost, but no. It’s just not there.’
I want to ask him all sorts of questions but his girlfriend returns and that sad, open expression on his face vanishes. A new song comes on. My brother undoes another button on his own shirt, and begins dancing again, the moves sexier, more absurd than before. I can’t stop looking at his face, the deceptive ease in the eyes, in the motion of his body. He doesn’t look lonely, not one bit. I know, though, that Monika has left him for good. And he wasn’t sure about her until she did.
He invites me to join him now with a dazzling, comradely nod. The girl that I tried to kiss is leaning over her cranberry and vodka and staring at my brother. His girlfriend is also watching his display. She shakes her head with loving good humour, then gets up and joins him. He dances like he has known his girlfriend all of his life, like he will never leave her.
‘Come on, Mike,’ my brother says.
I am sick from too much alcohol and feel as if someone has poured glue into my heart. I want no part of this. I know that I can’t do it in the way that my brother does. I only look awkward when I try.
I start dancing.
~
It was the height of summer when I returned to Australia. My brother didn’t ask much about Andreas. He had always seemed slightly bored by our father and his only disappointment appeared to be that he’d missed out on seeing his childhood friends.
‘Andreas says nothing happened,’ I told him a few weeks after my return.
We were sitting on the couch. My brother was watching the cricket. He could sit there in front of the television for hours when the cricket was on, his face as unmoving as the faces on the screen.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘Between you and him. He says Mum made it all up, that she’s unstable.’
Con laughed. I mentioned seeing my friend Max with Andreas quite a bit, although I didn’t say what we’d watched together.
‘Yeah,’ my brother said. ‘Some of the guys on my soccer team used to hang at his house, all the time, even when I wasn’t around.’
He turned to me and gave me a brief smile. He had a way of smiling without showing his teeth that had nothing to do with putting on charm. Something bleak would come into his face.
By this stage, our father had phoned up a couple of times. He had already begun talking of seeing my brother in the coming year, of making the arrangements. The next time he phoned, my brother asked to speak to him.
‘Andreas.’ Con spoke softly into the phone. He listened for a moment, then said, ‘I hate your fucking guts. You’re a sick coward. Don’t call here again.’
He put down the phone and went into his room. He came out with his spearfishing gear.
‘It’s blowing a westerly,’ he told me. ‘Bet the water’s dead flat.’
He took me out spearfishing for the first time during that summer. We plunged off the rocks together and started paddling out towards the tankers on the horizon. We paddled for twenty minutes, way past the shark nets. I was terrified of sharks. I couldn’t see the bottom, only islands of shadow and strange turns of light, and fish, longer than my arms, sliding past as if I didn’t exist.
Every now and again, my brother kicked down and left me drifting above him in a cloud of bubbles. I didn’t know how to follow him down. Alone, at the surface, I shivered and choked at each watery breath in my snorkel until I saw him rising towards me. Often when he did, the carcass of a fish hung from his spear. He nearly always managed to shoot fish in the eye. When he was nearby, I lifted my head and stared back longingly at the thin ribbon of the shoreline, but the thought of paddling back alone filled me with a sickening fear.
By the time we returned to shore, I could not feel my hands or feet and my teeth chattered so fiercely that I thought they would shatter. I asked him whether he ever got scared out there by himself.
‘No,’ he told me.
‘What do you think of when you’re out there?’
He showed his teeth. ‘Nothing. The fish.’
My brother was sixteen years old by then, well proportioned and broad-shouldered. My own limbs were longer and thinner and had always felt strange to me. His short, dark hair was tousled and rough with salt water. He crouched with one knee on the rocks and opened the belly of each of his fish with a practised motion. He tossed fistfuls of guts to the seagulls that wheeled and descended around us.
While he stared back over the blue drape of the ocean, he remarked that he was impressed with how I had stayed out with him for nearly two hours. He had come prepared, in a thick rubber wetsuit, while I wore only my swimmers. I had never heard him say that before, that he was impressed with me.
I had recently begun wearing my brother’s old clothes. He never handed them down to me—he sold them. He would throw his old things away if he didn’t get the price he wanted. I often bought the clothes from him, but they never sat well on me. I was too skinny and his clothes were already worn by the time they got to me; I looked like a scarecrow. So I focused on the way I had seen my brother wear them, the ease with which he moved inside his skin.
My brother’s friends used to call me by his name. They added junior at the end, as if I were his son. But apart from the history we shared, I was more aware of our difference. My brother had a broad Australian accent and blended into school in every way. My own accent still carried the thick, stumbling textures of Holland. I was much taller than the people around me, and solitary.
My brother could pick up any sort of sporting implement and act like he had been using it for years, and he had an easy contempt for those who didn’t have that natural ability.
‘Have you actually seen yourself try to surf?�
� he said to me when he was eighteen, without looking at me. ‘It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.’
I flew into a rage. I stood in front of him and screamed at him. I described in great detail how he had always put me down, how he had oppressed me, made my life hell, despite the fact that I had only ever admired him. He turned white, as if all of this was news to him, and for once he did not lash back. After that, he never hit me again, and he’d occasionally find ways of praising me. He’d tell me that I was better with words than he was, that I was the clever one.
All of this runs through my mind as we walk home together from the pub. He’s different when we are alone together, out in the open air, more like the boy I remember following when we were young. The boy that I admired without question. I have the urge to make a connection with him. We live in different cities. Our lives are more separate than ever. I decide to tell him something that I’ve never told anyone. I tell him that I watched porn at our father’s house, twenty years ago.
His footsteps don’t even falter. His expression remains fixed. ‘Really? Why didn’t you tell me earlier?’
‘Dunno.’ I can feel myself blushing all of a sudden. ‘It felt like a betrayal, I guess. I was ashamed. No idea why I did it, either. I just wanted him to like me, to include me in things.’
Con laughs softly. ‘That’s why I used to get so angry at you. You had no idea what that would have meant.’
We walk on in silence.
‘Good old Andreas,’ my brother says after a moment. ‘I wonder what he looks like now.’
‘Probably smaller than you’d think.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Reckon you’ll ever see him again?’
‘Don’t know. It’d be funny, wouldn’t it?’
He makes a playful kick at a bottle lying on the footpath and pushes his hands into the pockets of his jeans. I haven’t seen him play soccer in a long time, though he has a habit of kicking at things—pieces of rubbish, plants, the occasional cat. He does it without seeming to notice.