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By Root 758 0

plastic trap. When he throws me a beer I realise it’s exactly what I feel like. The rest of the cans he tips into an esky. By silent consensus we head outside and sit on the deck. Through the gums and melaleucas, the thick pelt of scrub and sedge along its banks, the river is light brown, slow, milky. This river that famously flows upside down. The day’s heat hangs in the air but is no longer suffocating. The brightness no longer angry. We finish the beers, and then the next ones, and the next. I hadn’t realised how thirsty I was. He tells me he walked along the river, up to the falls. He saw kayakers there, rehearsing their moves, and uni students doing water tests. I picture the concrete-capped, rubbish-choked weir, the graffitied basalt boulders, all dominated by the Eastern Freeway roaring overhead. I wonder whether it brought to his mind another river—the same river—running beside and below a different freeway. I wonder whether, when he stares out at this river now, he connects it to that other river a few kays dead south of here; if he follows it, in his mind’s eye, through its windings and loops, through Collingwood, and Abbotsford, and Richmond, and Burnley—to South Yarra.

He throws me another beer. The barbeque is all but forgotten. I’m getting a bit dreamy with alcohol, my mind draggling in the heat.

‘So what’s going on with you anyway?’

‘What?’ I say, even though I heard him. I have no idea why I said this. I start to audition sentences to make my answer over but this only affirms the silence. My brother snorts, then hoists his drink in a wry toast. I skol my can, stand up and torpedo it into the bush. I’ll pick it up later. A pair of rowers glance at us from the river and wave.

‘Jesus,’ my brother says, ‘I really screwed her up.’

‘Nothing you could have done. She was on edge the whole time.’ After my last chance, I’m now eager to speak. ‘Probably junk too. And those friends of hers—in Footscray.’

‘What?’ His brow creases. ‘Nah, I meant Mum.’ He looks at me curiously for a second, then scoffs at himself. ‘Though her too, I guess.’

I recall a story Baby told me during her last visit, how a friend of hers in detention had collapsed from withdrawal; the male guards had grabbed her, double-cuffed her, stuck a motorbike helmet on her head for two days so she couldn’t ‘hurt herself’.

‘Mum still going up to that temple?’

He’d come back from jail and I’d fantasised about receiving his confidences. He’d copped the time for both of us—knowing, surely, that I would’ve done the same. But he hadn’t grown more open at all. Nor the couple of other times he’d visited. Only this time seemed different. This was the most communicative I’d ever seen him.

‘In Sunshine? I think so.’ He doesn’t react, so I go on, ‘I think once she ran into one of the families there. I heard one of them spat in her face.’

He nods absently. ‘And you? You okay?’

The directness of his question stuns me. I saunter my arm out along the view. ‘What’s not to be okay about?’

‘Listen,’ he says. ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘What?’

‘That stuff Mum said about you doing talks.’

‘It’s nothing. Just uni stuff.’ I feel myself smirking. ‘They just need someone with slanty eyes who can speak in their language.’

‘What sort of stuff do you say?’

‘You know—just whatever they wanna hear.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like poverty, or language issues. Cultural marginalisation . . .’

‘They don’t ask about what happened that night?’

‘You mean do I talk about you.’

He shakes his head impatiently. He’s working himself up to something and it puts me on edge. ‘I mean, don’t they ask why? Why I did it? I mean, isn’t all the rest of it bullshit?’

‘Why we did it. I was there too.’

‘Yeah,’ he says, visibly annoyed at having been interrupted. ‘You’re right. I forget. I’m sorry.’ I wait for him to go on but now I’ve mucked up his thinking. ‘It’s all bullshit,’ he says again, struggling to recall his argument, and out of some old fraternal deference I find myself looking away. I listen to the frogs gulping for air down by the rushes. The black ducks and reed warblers. My heart