Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [28]
In the toilet at the pub, I stare in the mirror set into the gleaming white tiles, direct a frothy stream of piss into the urinal, and weigh my romantic potential. Chest hair shows at the unbuttoned juncture of my shirt. I follow my brother’s advice; I draw on my inner Greek. I have no idea what that means though. I have no memory of the places my father came from, and only a few memories of him. For me it has always been guesswork.
I make my way back into the crowded bar and return to the place where I left my brother and his girlfriend and Anna. My brother has just been on a diving trip to Fiji and talk has turned to sharks.
‘I hate swimming in the ocean,’ Anna says, ‘because I always think of sharks.’
‘I’d bet you’d feel safe with me,’ I tell her when the bustle of the pub separates us momentarily from the others.
Her eyes dart into mine and she looks away.
I take her hand and move in close. ‘I’d love to kiss you right now.’
Anna uses my hands to gently leverage me away.
‘You shouldn’t,’ she says. ‘I’m not attracted to you at all. I’m sorry.’
I lean back on my bar stool and the noise of the pub presses around me. Anna and my brother’s girlfriend go off to the toilets together. With his girlfriend gone, my brother’s gaze moves across the women in the pub with a naked intensity before it comes to rest on me.
‘How’s it going, Mike?’
‘I just tried to kiss Anna.’
‘Really? I thought you were just friends.’
‘There was more going on than that.’ I shrug and feel heat gather in my face. ‘For me at least.’
‘Ah, I know the feeling,’ my brother says. ‘I’m still in love with Maddie. When I go to Sweden, I might see if I can give her one last shot.’
‘Aren’t you in love with your girlfriend?’
His lips press inwards and his face softens into something desolate. ‘Almost, but no. It just isn’t there.’
For a moment he looks lost and I can imagine him as a boy. I want to ask him all sorts of questions then. His girlfriend and Anna return and that expression vanishes. A new song comes on. My brother undoes another button on his own shirt and resumes dancing, the moves sexier, more absurd than before. I can’t stop looking at his face. He invites me to join in with a dazzling, comradely nod. Anna is leaning over her cranberry and vodka, staring away. My brother’s girlfriend has eyes only for him. She shakes her head at his display with loving good humour, then gets up and joins in.
‘Come on, Mike,’ my brother says.
I think of other times that he’s said that to me while I stood on the rocks at the edge of the sea, or on the brink of some other adventure. I am sick from too much alcohol and feel as if someone has poured glue into my heart. I jump in. I start dancing. I wonder what is going through my brother’s head but I don’t know how to ask.
Later, as the two of us walk home from the pub, I glance across at my brother. Although he has drunk much more than me, his face is as contained as ever. I feel an intense, lonely urge to get beyond that expression. I tell him that I watched porn at our father’s house.
‘Really?’ he says. ‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier?’
‘Dunno.’ I find myself blushing as if it had all happened this very morning. ‘It felt like a betrayal, I guess. But when I was with Phytos, I couldn’t help myself. I just wanted him to like me, to include me in things.’
My brother laughs softly. ‘That’s why I used to get so angry at you. You had no idea what that would have meant. No idea at all.’
We walk on in silence.
‘Good old Phytos,’ my brother says after a moment. ‘I wonder what he looks like now.’
I wonder the same thing sometimes.
‘Reckon you’ll ever see him again?’
‘Don’t know. It’d be funny though, wouldn’t it?’
He aims a playful kick at a bottle lying on the footpath and pushes his hands into