Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [73]
‘You’re shaking,’ he had pointed out. We’d made it home and both showered; he’d scrubbed his face, I noticed, until it was bright pink. The corners of his temple lined with delicate blue veins.
‘I can’t piss. My bladder feels heavy as, but nothing comes out.’
He frowned, then reached out and clutched my neck with one of his strong pink hands. I knew the strength of those hands. My stomach hitched. He didn’t say anything, and at the physical contact I was shuddered back to our surreal, silent trip in the car; the fog descending upon the freeway canyons, the red blinking lights of radio towers blooming like blood corollas in the mist. The streets had sucked us through the city and shot us home.
‘If they come for us,’ my brother had said to me.
‘No one saw us.’
‘You weren’t there. If they come for us, you weren’t there.’
‘Hai and Long and Quang saw me.’
‘No they didn’t. I’ll talk to them.’
‘What about you?’
‘No matter what they say—so-and-so saw you, so-and-so ratted you out. Don’t listen to them. You weren’t there.’
‘What about you?’
He patted my neck, then removed his hand. The absence was a freezing burn. He was my rough flesh, he was rooted in the same soil, his heart and brain fed by the same blood, and never before had I felt so needful of him. He stood up and abruptly grimaced, clutching his right knee. Then his face smoothed over again. ‘I don’t think anyone who saw me will talk,’ he said. ‘But it shouldn’t take them long. To find out about the Ngos. And then me.’
‘You mean Baby?’
He nodded, then let out a short burst of air.
‘What?’
‘I’m not saying she’ll talk,’ he said.
‘She’s the one who called me.’
To this day I still remember how, when I told him this, he’d shaken his head and smiled. ‘I know,’ he’d said, as though unexpectedly amused. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Everything always goes back to Baby.’ Now it is summer, my brother sits with me on the deck of my own house and his face, sweaty and cooked well past pink, confirms itself in that same expression—bemused, sardonic, slightly otherwise occupied.
‘Listen to me,’ he says. ‘I’m glad you didn’t have to go down with me.’ His tone is flat with finality. ‘That was the best thing that happened this whole mess.’
‘Okay.’
‘That was the opposite of bullshit.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He waves it off. The light is dimming now and he turns away, but not before I catch a brief tensile movement in his expression. There’s a discipline holding his face together. I’m horrified by the sudden realisation that maybe he’s lying to me. ‘But see,’ he goes on, ‘what I mean is this. I was there, you were there. I don’t remember hardly anything. I was off my head but still.’ He pauses, perhaps suspicious of his own earnestness. Neither of us looks at the other. ‘Haven’t you tried to think about it, why we did it, and you can’t tell what’s what?’
I decide, in the brief silence that follows, that he’s not actully asking me this question.
‘What happened,’ he goes on, ‘and what everyone else says that happened?’
My face has reverted to its little-brother mask—imploring his censure and contempt, his instruction.
‘You’d think you’d remember everything.’
I nod. I approximate a wry sound. Then I venture, ‘I do. I do remember.’
He stops to absorb this. Then slowly, and to my great relief, his face slides back into its ironic smile. ‘Well, you have to. Otherwise, who’s gonna give those bloody speeches?’
That night. I’d been at a different club. They’d all gone to Jade—an Asian night—and I hated Asian nights. Too many try-hards, too much attitude. I was in the toilets when I got the call. There was a guy next to me