Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [68]
My brother was nineteen and one night came home drunk, flushed, probably high, and with a girl. This last had never happened before. There was a shadow on his jaw which I assumed was a bruise. After some time the girl said to me, ‘I’m Baby,’ then turned to him and exclaimed, ‘I can’t believe you weren’t gonna introduce me!’ then kissed him, all the while still talking into his mouth. He made some joke and she laughed and I was relieved, hearing her laugh, that it wasn’t the cutesy, infant squeaking so many Asian girls liked to perform in front of guys.
‘He talks about you all the time,’ she said, and laughed again.
I decided I liked her.
How long they’d been together wasn’t clear. It seemed, from Baby’s comfort with him, that it might have been a while. She was my brother’s first girlfriend, I think, and I’m not sure why that didn’t surprise me at the time. They’d just come home from a fight. I mentally staged it during their telling: Baby’s ex had been at the club, an Asian night, stewing deeper and hotter in Hennessee the longer he watched them until, at the final, emptying hour—the lights switched on and music off, bartenders wiping down bars, tallying the take—he’d called up his mates and followed them outside.
Something flew out of the night towards Thuan’s head. He ducked, the bottle smashing against a car, setting off the alarm. I knew that club: its main entrance fed onto a cul-de-sac backed in by warehouses, roller-iron doors, a multi-storey car park giving out the only light. Under that spotty, gas-like glow, my brother turned around and saw them—maybe a dozen of them. Their movements loose and stiff with alcohol. He had Baby with him, and the four Ngo brothers—that was it. Breath shortening, the great engine of his glands working till he felt again the thick familiar twists of hormones through his body, he fended Baby back against the blaring car, made quick eye contact with the Ngos, for whom he felt himself flooding with a feeling of deep loyalty, and waited. You can always tell the seriousness of a fight by the speed of first approach. Baby’s ex feinted forward, then his crew herky-jerked at them, and instantly my brother knew in his body the entire shape of what would follow. The only surprise was the set of strangers who jumped in to help them; it was only later, in the nervy racing-away euphoria, that they were introduced as Baby’s friends from Footscray; only later still, well past the point of ready return, that he learned the guy in the red baseball cap—as affable afterwards as he was vicious during the fight—was another of Baby’s exes.
‘You should’ve been there,’ Thuan said magnanimously, rubbing the sore spot on his jaw. ‘We could have used you out there tonight.’
‘You did okay,’ said Baby.
I studied her closely—this girl they’d all fought over. She had a face struck together by contrasts: the Asian hair—so black it looked wet—offset by almost European features: chalky skin, sunken cheeks, lips in a burnished shade of red that belonged to some earlier, jazz-smoked era. Her body was slight and wonderfully slouched. She had, all in all, the look of a good girl gone a bit grungy. Thinking of their story, I saw her arms lined by light in the alley, locked crossed amid the scudding bodies, the car alarm caterwauling through her skull. Then I saw my brother watching her. He looked the happiest I’d ever seen him.
‘I wish I had been there,’ I said, and meant it.
That summer, I spent more time with Thuan than ever before or since; Baby liked my company, insisted on it, and my brother was surprisingly acquiescent—especially given we’d never really had any mutual friends. She called him Little T and so, with even less reason, I became Big T. I came to need her, and probably