Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [63]
‘You still got my old t-shirt,’ Thuan says. Even his voice sounds humid. He comes out, barefoot and bare-chested, stepping around my punching bag without even feinting assault.
‘Sleep okay?’
‘If you mean did I drown in my own sweat.’
He’s feeling talkative. ‘You came in late,’ I say. ‘There’s a fan.’
He pads around the deck, inspecting it. Since he was last here I’ve jerry-rigged a small workout area, a tarpaulin overhang. I painted the concrete underfoot in bright, now faded, colours. He lowers himself onto the flat bench. Then under his breath he says, ‘Alright,’ as though sceptically conceding a point. He shakes his head. ‘This bloody drought,’ he says.
‘I know, I’ve been going down there,’ I say, nodding at the river. ‘Bringing water up—for the garden and whatnot.’
‘Why?’
‘You know.’ He’s making me self-conscious. ‘The herbs and stuff.’
‘I mean why not just use the hose?’
I glance at him. Where has he been that there aren’t water restrictions? Then I catch his meaning: who cared about the water restrictions? What could they do to you?
A shyness takes hold of me, then I say, ‘I dreamt about Saturday sports.’
To my surprise he starts laughing. He lifts up his face, already sweat-glossed, and bares his mouth widely. Yes, he’s changed since I saw him last. ‘Remember when you broke that guy’s leg? And they wanted us to forfeit?’
I tell him I remember, though in my memory it was he, and not I, who had done the leg breaking. We’d played on the same team some years. For a confusing moment I’m shuttled back into my morning’s dream: the brittle sky, the sun a pale yolk broken across it. Then the specific memory finds me—the specific faces—the injured kid with what seemed an expression of short-breathed delight, as if someone had just told a hugely off-colour joke; the odd, elsewhere smirk playing on our father’s lips as he came onto the field to collect us, batting off the coach’s earnest officialese, the rising rancour of the opposing parents.
‘The look on his face,’ I scoff.
I wait for Thuan to go on with the story but apparently he’s done. He’s chuckling still, but the sound has no teeth in it and that makes me wary. I feel oddly tested by him.
‘Coffee?’
He thinks about it. Then, as though shoved, he falls backwards along the bench, twisting his upper body at the last second beneath the barbell. Hurriedly I count up the weight—one-twenty kilos on a fifteen-kilo bar—not shameful, but nor is it my PB.
‘Wanna spot?’ I ask, making it clear from my tone that I’m joking.
He jerks the bar off the stand and correctly, easily, completes three presses. When he’s done he remains on his back, arms gone loose on either side of the narrow bench as though parodying one of the weekend kayakers on the river below. I follow his long breaths. For some time he doesn’t move or speak, and in the half-dark I wonder if it’s possible he’s fallen back asleep. All around us the cicadas beat on, their timbre unsteady, deranged by the interminable heat of the night. I settle back too. A strong whiff of sage from the garden. Trees and bushes sliding into their outlines. Buying this place when I came into my inheritance was the smartest thing I ever did—despite its rundown state, subsiding foundations, the light-industrial mills and factories on every side. I couldn’t have known then that ten years on, at thirty-three, I’d be living here alone, jobless. I couldn’t have reasoned that I’d end up folding each of my days into this early-morning mood, trained on the dark river below, sensing that the mood, though ineffable, was one less of sorrow than of loss—and that what I called my life would be answerable to it. I know this: my brother, when he comes, muddies this mood in me. For this I am glad, as for the fact that we are bound to each other in all the ways that matter.
As though invoked, he speaks up. ‘I’ll be out of your hair in a couple of days,’ he says. Then he gets up and goes into the dark bushes, presumably to take a piss.
Physical excellence has always been important between us. As a boy,