‘No,’ he told me.
‘What do you think of when you’re out there?’
He showed his teeth. ‘Nothing. Just the fish.’
My brother was by this time sixteen years old, well proportioned, and broad-shouldered. My own limbs were longer and felt strange to me. His short, dark hair was tousled and rough with salt water. There was often a subtle but intent scowl on his face that sat like a wall in front of whatever I imagined that he was thinking. He crouched with one knee on the rocks and opened the belly of each of his fish with a practised motion. He tossed fistfuls of guts to the seagulls that wheeled and descended around us.
Staring back over the blue drape of the ocean, he remarked that he was impressed how I had stayed out with him for nearly two hours. He had come prepared, in a thick rubber wetsuit, while I wore only my swimmers. I had never heard him say that to me before, that he was impressed with me. I didn’t tell him the truth.
I have this dream sometimes, that I am small and standing at a door. The door is orange and it has a window above it. Through this window, which is slanted open, I can hear my brother and my father. I am outside the door. They are playing a game on the other side. I am calling out, trying to get their attention, but the door remains closed.
My brother often sold me his old clothes. He would dangle them in front of me and offer them at a price. There was never any negotiation. If I refused to pay the price, he threw them out with a mocking, regretful expression. I bought many of his clothes but they never sat on me properly. I was taller than him, but skinnier, and his clothes were already worn by the time they got to me, so that I looked like a lost scarecrow. I rarely saw myself wearing them though. I made a point of not looking at myself. Instead I focused on the way I had seen my brother wear them, the ease with which he moved inside his skin. I was fascinated by his surface.
All of my brother’s friends used to call me by his name. They added junior at the end as if I were his son, and so I was known, but apart from the history we shared, I was more aware of our difference. My brother had a broad Australian accent that he had acquired within a year or so of our arrival, and he blended in at school in every way. My own accent still carried the thick, stumbling textures of Holland. I was much taller than the people around me and solitary.
My brother could pick up any sort of sporting equipment and act like he had been using it for years and he had an easy contempt for those who didn’t have that natural ability.
When he was eighteen he said to me, ‘Have you ever actually stopped to look at yourself?’
There was such derision in his tone that I flew into a rage. I described in great detail how he had always put me down, how he had oppressed me, made my life hell despite the fact that I had only ever admired him. He turned white, as if all of this was news to him. After that, he’d sometimes find ways of praising me. He’d tell me that I was better with words than he was, that I was the clever one.
I was used to admiring my brother because it was all that I had ever seen other people do. On the last day of my trip to Holland, when my father drove my mother and me back to the airport, Phytos began discussing with a feverish kind of enthusiasm the possibility of seeing my brother the next time.
Suddenly Mum said, ‘Mike has all these wonderful qualities that you’ve just never seen.’
‘Oh look,’ Phytos said after a moment of silence, ‘I guess I just never really noticed them because he’s so different to me.’
‘Different how?’
‘You know, sensitive, fragile. A bit like . . .’
‘Me?’
‘Maybe, maybe,’ he said.
He added, with his peculiar foreign manner of phrase, that my brother was easier to love because he was more in his own image. The unabashed way in which he said this while I sat in the car with him struck me with a kind of awe. I don’t remember how this conversation ended, but it was dark and trees shot up from the flat landscape like spears into the smoky grey sky.
My father hugged me at the airport and I kissed his cheek. Despite how I felt about him, the well-kept surface, with its hint of stubble and a sophisticated whiff of aftershave, evoked in me a distilled sort of happiness, and I remembered how seeing my father when I was a kid in Holland had meant the headlong rush into a most wonderful and seductive feeling of potential.
My mother and I got on the plane and sat side by side, in silence. The plane taxied along the runway. There was a low, dull smother of clouds pressing on the landscape, making it vague, and rain sliced across the narrow window beside me. The plane turned and paused. Then it jolted forward and raced along the tarmac with a fierce shudder. Grey filled the window and then tore away to reveal a dazzling, clear sky. It was surprising to see that sky, to remember that it existed.
In the toilet at the pub, I stare in the mirror set into the gleaming white tiles, direct a frothy stream of piss into the urinal, and weigh my romantic potential. Chest hair shows at the unbuttoned juncture of my shirt. I follow my brother’s advice; I draw on my inner Greek. I have no idea what that means though. I have no memory of the places my father came from, and only a few memories of him. For me it has always been guesswork.
I make my way back into the crowded bar and return to the place where I left my brother and his girlfriend and Anna. My brother has just been on a diving trip to Fiji and talk has turned to sharks.
‘I hate swimming in the ocean,’ Anna says, ‘because I always think of sharks.’
‘I’d bet you’d feel safe with me,’ I tell her when the bustle of the pub separates us momentarily from the others.
Her eyes dart into mine and she looks away.
I take her hand and move in close. ‘I’d love to kiss you right now.’
Anna uses my hands to gently leverage me away.
‘You shouldn’t,’ she says. ‘I’m not attracted to you at all. I’m sorry.’
I lean back on my bar stool and the noise of the pub presses around me. Anna and my brother’s girlfriend go off to the toilets together. With his girlfriend gone, my brother’s gaze moves across the women in the pub with a naked intensity before it comes to rest on me.
‘How’s it going, Mike?’
‘I just tried to kiss Anna.’
‘Really? I thought you were just friends.’
‘There was more going on than that.’ I shrug and feel heat gather in my face. ‘For me at least.’
‘Ah, I know the feeling,’ my brother says. ‘I’m still in love with Maddie. When I go to Sweden, I might see if I can give her one last shot.’
‘Aren’t you in love with your girlfriend?’
His lips press inwards and his face softens into something desolate. ‘Almost, but no. It just isn’t there.’
For a moment he looks lost and I can imagine him as a boy. I want to ask him all sorts of questions then. His girlfriend and Anna return and that expression vanishes. A new song comes on. My brother undoes another button on his own shirt and resumes dancing, the moves sexier, more absurd than before. I can’t stop looking at his face. He invites me to join in with a dazzling, comradely nod. Anna is leaning over her cranberry and vodka, staring away. My brother’s girlfriend has eyes only for him. She shakes her head at his display with loving good humour, then gets up and joins in.
‘Come on, Mike,’ my brother says.
I think of other times that he’s said that to me while I stood on the rocks at the edge of the sea, or on the brink of some other adventure. I am sick from too much alcohol and feel as if someone has poured glue into my heart. I jump in. I start dancing. I wonder what is going through my brother’s head but I don’t know how to ask.
Later, as the two of us walk home from the pub, I glance across at my brother. Although he has drunk much more than me, his face is as contained as ever. I feel an intense, lonely urge to get beyond that expression. I tell him that I watched porn at our father’s house.
‘Really?’ he says. ‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier?’
‘Dunn
o.’ I find myself blushing as if it had all happened this very morning. ‘It felt like a betrayal, I guess. But when I was with Phytos, I couldn’t help myself. I just wanted him to like me, to include me in things.’
My brother laughs softly. ‘That’s why I used to get so angry at you. You had no idea what that would have meant. No idea at all.’
We walk on in silence.
‘Good old Phytos,’ my brother says after a moment. ‘I wonder what he looks like now.’
I wonder the same thing sometimes.
‘Reckon you’ll ever see him again?’
‘Don’t know. It’d be funny though, wouldn’t it?’
He aims a playful kick at a bottle lying on the footpath and pushes his hands into the pockets of his jeans. I haven’t seen him play soccer in a long time, but he has a habit of kicking at things—pieces of rubbish, plants, the occasional cat. He does it without seeming to notice.
‘Yeah, funny, alright,’ I say.
I walk beside him and think of how strange it is having such a father in our lives, for the two of us to be bound together in that way.
When he surfaces in our conversation we call him ‘Dad’ once or twice for comic effect, but we always fall back into Phytos, which in my mind has the dusty resonance of an old curse. We sometimes argue about who looks more like him, and in the stillness of photographs it’s me, but then I can’t put on his voice the way my brother does. And the smile that obliterates doubt in almost everyone, including the wearer, the dazzling smile that made me want to try anything as a boy, that is my brother’s.
I stare across at my brother, the face set, that brilliant glint in his dark eyes. I tell him that we have never talked about what happened between him and Phytos; that I’d like to. The thought actually frightens the shit out of me, but a part of me needs to know just more than the hazy detail. I know that he won’t tell Mum anything else. He wants her to sleep at night. He flashes me a grin then stares off down the road. We’ll talk about it, he says. We’ll have a beer and talk about it someday.
THE CRICKET
PALACE
Charlotte Wood
Wendy pressed ‘send’, knowing that Leonie had almost certainly not expected her to say yes. It was Leonie’s second wedding, after all, and had been arranged at short notice. They wanted to marry while they were still on their trip, her email said, but the whole thing would be very casual.
And Wendy was seventy-one years old, and Greece was a long way away. She knew it was quite possible Leonie did not really want her to come.
Too bad, she thought. I am going to Greece.
Sitting in front of the computer she remembered Athens, with Jim. Staying near the Parthenon, in a small hotel room with a large crack across its dingy porcelain basin, and making love every day because it was holidays, and walking and walking until late into the evenings. A fistful of old lust gripped and turned, briefly, inside her.
She looked across the room at the jar of remaining ashes on the telephone table. She kept what was left in a squat terracotta jar with a warm grey ceramic lid, which they had bought together many years ago in Shanghai, at the insect market. The jar was a home for a fighting cricket. Most of the cricket houses at the market were small, many made of rusted, cut-down food tins. But this—this was a mansion for a cricket. It was satisfyingly smooth and cool to hold, and its girth was covered in columns of fine black calligraphy. Of course they never knew what the characters meant, but they had called it the cricket palace.
For years Wendy used it to keep salt in, next to the stove. But when the crematorium people gave her the ugly plastic urn, her most urgent thought was Get him out of there, and she emptied the ashes into various containers about the house: a small inlaid wooden box Jim gave her once, a silver sugar bowl with a hinged lid that had belonged to her mother, and the cricket palace.
A good while later—too long later, most people seemed to think— Wendy and her sister Ruth, Ruth’s husband Alan and their children Leonie and Paul, as well as the few friends Wendy still had left, stood awkwardly on a steep, narrow slope just off the walking track in the national park at Bradleys Head, and Wendy’s voice went thin as she read a poem, and she tossed Jim in desultory handfuls towards the knuckled ground beneath the angophora trees.
She hated leaving the little flung piles of white gravel there in the scrub, had an urge to kneel and scrabble the bits back up with her fingers, but she knew Jim would have liked it. Just chuck me here at the end, he had said often enough as they marched that bush track above the harbour.
But there was still the cricket palace. Sometimes, when she talked on the phone, she lifted the lid and swirled her finger around in the gritty powder.
When Ruth saw the terracotta pot on the telephone desk a few months ago she’d said, ‘Why’ve you got your salt there?’
Wendy told her, and Ruth screeched. ‘Ugh! I don’t know how you can do that! How horrible!’
Wendy had a great desire to rush across the carpet and smack her sister’s face.
Wendy assumed she would be the only one of her generation to go to the wedding. In a private part of herself she hoped she was the only one invited, but of course Leonie would have to ask her parents. But they didn’t like travel. And Alan’s prostate procedure was scheduled only weeks before the wedding.
So it was a surprise when Ruth, who had been to London once at the age of twenty-three, and came back quick smart, declared that she would go to the Greek island too, with Wendy.
Sisters! she cried down the phone. It will be a sisters trip!
On the plane they fastened their seatbelts, and Ruth leaned to one side, scoping the aisle. She had filled the empty seat between them with things she had bought at the airport, scurrying around the shops while Wendy read. The seat was filled with magazines, a leopard-print velour U-shaped neck cushion filled with polystyrene beads, a pink shawl that Ruth called a pashmina. It was not really a pashmina, it was synthetic, but Wendy didn’t say anything. She had left her own real pashminas at home.
Ruth, leaning sideways, kept glancing up the aisle and then nodding conspiratorially at Wendy. ‘Only a few people now,’ she whispered, trying to suppress a triumphant smirk. ‘It’s unlikely.’
Wendy wished Jim were here. He had been dead two years but she wished, so often, that he were here.
Once, in the dark hours, with the plane’s dull roar hurtling them through the black skies and everyone else asleep, Wendy looked up to see Ruth swaying down the aisle on her way back from the toilet. She took little steps in her thick pink socks, peering down at the seats as she went, trying to find her home. She looked old, teetering there in the gloom.
At the little airport on the island a grizzled young man wearing a shoddy grey suit and a crumpled yellow woollen tie held up a piece of paper with their names handwritten on it in small unsteady biro.
‘Oh dear,’ muttered Ruth. They were both exhausted. Wendy did not want to admit it, but the plane travel—first to Athens, and then to the island—had been ghastly. Eventually, she had found, it was difficult to distinguish the smell of the food from the smell of the other passengers. Her back ached. But she saw with satisfaction that although Ruth was eight years younger, she walked equally stiffly along the grey linoleum of the airport.
Still. Wendy did not wish to agree with Ruth that this forlorn young man looked disappointing, so she took charge. She strode over to him, smiling. ‘Kalimera,’ she called in a clear voice above the airport hubbub.
He looked alarmed. ‘I’m Australian,’ he said.
Ruth pushed past him towards the carousel. ‘Oh yes,’ she called over her shoulder to Wendy. ‘That’s Jeremy’s friend.’
Out in the car park Wendy stood by, being gracious, while the young man—Derek—hoisted the women’s suitcases into the back of his small four-wheel drive. Derek had lived on the island for some years. Ruth’s gaze flicked up and down him, contemptuous of his nerviness and dishevelment. And as soon as she heard the central locking clunk op
en she clambered surprisingly nimbly into the back seat, pulling the door shut behind her.
Wendy turned to reach for the front passenger door handle and then saw—suddenly, unbelievably—they were here. A Greek island.
She took a sharp breath, and stood for a moment in the hot still air, gazing up to the hill above them. The town was white and brittle and frilled like beach coral against the hard blue sky. The sudden beauty of it unbalanced her. She and Jim had never travelled to the islands, only to Athens. She felt her eyes water—she wished Jim were here squeezing her hand, wished they were both thirty and breathless with this shock of splendour and each other.
But Ruth scowled at her through the window, and Derek stood frowning at Wendy across the car roof.
She smiled at him. ‘It’s so . . . beautiful,’ she said lamely.
Derek looked morose and yanked open his door. ‘People who don’t live here always think it’s beautiful.’
As the car lurched through the car park, out into the street, Wendy dragged her gaze back from the Greek town to Derek.
‘Have you had much to do with the wedding preparations?’
He shot her an odd look. After an instant he said, ‘No-o,’ and looked as if he might laugh. He said, ‘I have a few dramas in my life at the moment.’ Then he leaned forward, squinting out under the sun visor, and revved the car in a savage burst up around a corner onto a larger ring road.
Wendy looked back at Ruth, who made a face that meant, ‘He’s crazy,’ but also gave a little smirk that meant she was glad to be in the back seat.
‘I’m just doing them a favour,’ said Derek. ‘I work for myself, so they obviously just thought I could up and leave everything and come and get you.’
They climbed the hills. Down below them was white limestone and green water. Derek ground the gears.
‘Well,’ said Wendy, ‘we’re very grateful. Aren’t we, Ruth?’
‘Yes,’ came Ruth’s bored, unconvincing voice from the back.
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