Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [27]
Staring back over the blue drape of the ocean, he remarked that he was impressed 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 to me before, that he was impressed with me. I didn’t tell him the truth.
I have this dream sometimes, that I am small and standing at a door. The door is orange and it has a window above it. Through this window, which is slanted open, I can hear my brother and my father. I am outside the door. They are playing a game on the other side. I am calling out, trying to get their attention, but the door remains closed.
My brother often sold me his old clothes. He would dangle them in front of me and offer them at a price. There was never any negotiation. If I refused to pay the price, he threw them out with a mocking, regretful expression. I bought many of his clothes but they never sat on me properly. I was taller than him, but skinnier, and his clothes were already worn by the time they got to me, so that I looked like a lost scarecrow. I rarely saw myself wearing them though. I made a point of not looking at myself. Instead I focused on the way I had seen my brother wear them, the ease with which he moved inside his skin. I was fascinated by his surface.
All of my brother’s friends used to call me by his name. They added junior at the end as if I were his son, and so I was known, but apart from the history we shared, I was more aware of our difference. My brother had a broad Australian accent that he had acquired within a year or so of our arrival, and he blended in at 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 equipment 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.
When he was eighteen he said to me, ‘Have you ever actually stopped to look at yourself?’
There was such derision in his tone that I flew into a rage. 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. After that, he’d sometimes find ways of praising me. He’d tell me that I was better with words than he was, that I was the clever one.
I was used to admiring my brother because it was all that I had ever seen other people do. On the last day of my trip to Holland, when my father drove my mother and me back to the airport, Phytos began discussing with a feverish kind of enthusiasm the possibility of seeing my brother the next time.
Suddenly Mum said, ‘Mike has all these wonderful qualities that you’ve just never seen.’
‘Oh look,’ Phytos said after a moment of silence, ‘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 added, with his peculiar foreign manner of phrase, that my brother was easier to love because he was more in his own 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, but it was dark and trees shot up from the flat landscape like spears into the smoky grey sky.
My father hugged me at the airport and I kissed his cheek. Despite how I felt about him, the well-kept surface, with its hint of stubble and a sophisticated whiff of aftershave, evoked in me a distilled sort of happiness, and I remembered how seeing my father when I was a kid in Holland had meant the headlong rush into a most wonderful and seductive feeling of potential.
My mother and I got on the plane and sat side by side, in silence. The plane taxied along the runway. There was a low, dull smother of clouds pressing on the landscape,