Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [65]
‘What happened?’ Mum asks. She’s had a long day and her face is closed and loose.
‘Nothing.’
She pauses. ‘I’ll tell your dad.’
I look at her scornfully. Even she knows that doesn’t deserve an answer.
One of the common tacks in media accounts of my brother, I noticed—beyond the routine designation of ‘monster’—was to call attention to his inscrutability. None of the other culprits merited such consideration. The Ngo boys, for instance, always looked thug–gishly guilty. But courtroom reporters and sketch artists described, artfully and self-consciously, their failure of scrutiny in the face of Thuan Xuan Nguyen; a face typically depicted as ‘smooth’, or ‘mask-like’, on someone whose very name rebuffed pronunciation in each of its three syllables. I could understand their frustration. My brother was a person in whom deep faults ran, yet always he seemed to conduct them into something like charisma. All my life I never judged him; to me he represented the fulfilment of my own genomic seed and tatter. I never suspected, after all that happened, at the trial and beyond, that complete strangers might also be capable of my reservation. This is not to defend what he did. This is to say I understood, completely, the media’s macabre, manic insistence on the details of that night. The facts of the matter. The altercation and eviction from the nightclub. The first victim chased down and hacked to death by a gang wielding machetes, meat cleavers and samurai swords. The sickening count of wounds on his body. Victims two and three fleeing into the Yarra, carried by the water approximately two hundred metres to the west—shadowed alongshore by the gang. One with gashes on his wrists and forearms, three fingers missing below the knuckle, from a presumed attempt to return to shore. Chances are you may recall these details. The sober-faced riverside TV reports, the strongly worded declarations by members of the mayor’s office, the Homicide Squad, the Asian Squad—while in the wintry background, day on day, the grieving families held vigil, wailing in Vietnamese as they proffered incense sticks, lit and let go of tissue paper. You may have even heard me speak, in one of my presentations, about this incident. Most people recognise my brother only through one of his tabloid nicknames: the Meat Cleaver Murderer. He was there on the bank that night. Here’s what most people won’t know—what I’ve never spoken about: I was there with him.
When it gets light my brother showers and heads out. I laze on the couch in the living room, windows open but curtains drawn, shirtless in front of the rickety fan, rolling a chilled glass bottle of water back and forth across my chest. Otherwise, I try not to move. When the phone rings, it’s Mum—one of her friends has just spotted Thuan on Victoria Street. Is it true? Has he come back?
I’m waiting for him when he returns. We have to go visit Mum, I tell him. He stops, then nods, puts his sunnies back on. Outside, the air is so hot it immediately dries out my lungs; I can feel the bitumen boiling through my sandals. This is a killing sun. We walk south, through the Abbotsford chop shops and factories, the streets made slow, strange with heat vapour, the sudden assaultive glare of metal surfaces. People move, then pause in scant shadows. On the main street the tramlines look as though they’re liquefying. Too hot to think, let alone speak, we make our way towards the high-rise flats.
‘Child?’ our mother asks when she opens the door. She’s wearing brown silk pyjamas and there’s absolutely no sweat on her face.
‘Hello, Ma.’ My brother touches her shoulder for a second. She reaches up and cups his ear, then turns to smile at me.
When our father died I advised her to sell the house and car and move here—the flat was government-subsidised, located in the heart of a Vietnamese neighbourhood. During that period she was used to doing whatever I said. I see, looking back, it must have been hard going for her—moving from a family home with yard, driveway and