Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [104]
Anna pulled away from Mel. ‘I can’t dance to this.’
Mel, pouting, flung herself onto the dance floor. She danced on her own, claiming all of the small space, throwing herself into ugly jerks and spasms, singing along to the lyrics at the top of her lungs. Uncertain, Anna looked around the pub, at the tables of men laughing at the dancing woman.
‘Maybe we should stay a little while longer?’
Saverio ignored her and walked outside. She could stay if she wanted. Mel was obviously going to be a messy drunk and he did not want the responsibility of looking after her. Anna would learn that life lesson soon enough. But Anna was running after him. Without a word they got into the car.
‘She won’t be okay. We should have stayed.’
He grunted again.
Anna crossed her arms. ‘Why are you so angry?’
Maybe he should drive the car off the road, end it all in screeching tyres, smoke and fire and melting metal.
‘Aren’t you going to say a thing?’
His reply was to switch on the radio.
She turned it off immediately. ‘If I have forgiven him, so can you.’
The petulant spoiled child. This broke his silence.
‘You have not forgiven him. How could you forgive him?’
‘I have. I really have.’ Her tone was urgent, pleading. But he didn’t believe her. His brother did not deserve forgiveness.
‘What you told me just confirms that he was indeed an animal.’
‘That’s not true.’ She was stumbling for the right words. ‘He was just, you know . . . uncompromising . . .’
‘For fuck’s sake, Anna, he was a cunt. I’m glad he is dead.’
The words appeared to strike her with the force of a punch. Her body shrank into itself. When she spoke next, she was timid, barely audible. ‘Leo never lied. He loved sex. Sex was his politics. I always knew that about him.’
Politics? This wasn’t politics, this was delusion. Thank God it was over, thank God what they called politics—Leo, Dawn, Tom, the whole damn lot of them—thank God the world no longer listened to such rubbish. Thank God it was all going to die with them.
‘Nothing can excuse what he did to you.’
‘You’re so hard. Just like him, just like all of them. Why the fuck is your generation so hard?’
His foot slammed on the brake and the car swerved onto the side of the road.
Anna jolted forward. She screamed.
He turned on her. ‘I am not like them. I’m not anything like them. Do you understand?’
She was terrified now. He was mortified. It didn’t matter that Leo was dead. He’d always do this to him, always lay bare a rage he had thought long buried. Alive or dead, the memories and scars wrought on him by Leo were there forever. She had just seen it, that childish selfish annihilating hate. She cowered away from him.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.’
‘What the fuck did Leo do to you?’
He tried to explain. He told her of their father’s cancer, how it began in the stomach, then spread to the pancreas and how it reached the lungs, how the old man, a skeleton in his bed, the folds of flesh hanging off his bones, how he had succumbed to a delirium in which the past and the present were one. Where is my son, Saverio, where is your brother? Has he forgiven me? He told her about his countless calls to Leo, pleading with him, begging him to come home one last time. He told her what Leo had said to him: Good, the old bastard deserves to die in pain, he deserves to suffer. You can’t mean that, Leo. Don’t you get it, Sav? That man means nothing to me. He then told her how the fury had gripped him, how he had made the call and organised the plane ticket and flown to Coolangatta and hired the car and driven down the coast and up through the hills to force Leo to return. He told her how they had screamed at one another, slapped and punched one another, how he had gripped Leo’s hair and pulled him onto the porch, down the steps, dragged him through the gravel, Leo shrieking, biting him, scratching him, how it was only Julian who stilled their frenzy, Julian crying, howling at them to stop. Don’t, please, don’t.