‘Child,’ says Mum, her tone finally relaxing. ‘You’re too good for money now?’
Thuan leans back at the table, slightly embarrassed.
Mum stands up, brushing smooth her silk pyjama top. ‘Heavens,’ she says, ‘it’s been so long since I saw you. I’m going to tell you the truth—I didn’t know if I would see you again.’ Then, with her usual restraint, she checks herself. Smiling privately, as though she’s decided she has all the time she needs, she picks up the jug and heads into the kitchen to make more iced tea.
‘So Baby.’
The lift drops with the sound of metal squealing against itself.
‘Two or three years ago,’ I say. ‘It was an accident, they think.’
He looks straight ahead. ‘OD?’
I nod.
‘She was still in Footscray?’
‘Yeah, probably. I think so. I saw her—she was all straightened out.’
He frowns, maybe sensing my lie. ‘Not if she was still hanging out in Footscray she wasn’t.’ It’s the first time I’ve heard an edge of the old hard tone. ‘Jesus,’ he mutters. The lift opens, and I follow him through the two security doors back out into the heat.
In the presentations I’ve been asked to give, I generally concentrate on sociological factors until the inevitable moment I find myself nudged towards the incident. The cops at our door two days later, their duteous, scornful faces, all the scorn sucked into their eyes and the edges of their mouths as if to curb them from asking, What kind of animals are you? That you could do this to your own? These are not, I think, unfair questions. But the people who turn to me for answers aren’t looking to my master’s in political science, they’re looking at my one-of-them face, they’re looking at my pedigree of proximity: the fact I’m my brother’s brother. Not that I’m one of them, of course. I’m articulate and deferential, I’m charming to just the right degree. It’s that they trust me to tell them the inside story. They want to know—beneath the affidavits and agreed facts—how it happened. And so when I talk about socioeconomic disadvantage, about ghettoisation and tribal acting-out, about inexorable cycles of escalation, I say these things and I mean them, but even to me they start to sound insincere. What I mean to say but don’t—can’t—is that everything always starts with a girl, and in this case the girl was Baby.
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 what I needed most about her was him: the emergent, intricate person he became around her. He developed a way of talking to me through her, in third-person— Look at him—and he reckons he’s not on steroids! She kept him kind to me like that. At Brighton Beach she stripped to a grey bikini. When he caught me staring, he gave me a look that was warning and mockery, shy and full of braggadocio, knowing and forgiving all at once. Do you see what I mean? We lived then in slow-time; the light more viscous, the breath drawn deeper into our bodies. I had a new brother and a new name—how would I not rally to both?
When we get back, Thuan breaks the silence and tells me to head inside—he’s going to keep wandering. There’s no invitation in his announcement so I go in—glad to escape the punishing heat—strip to my boxers, splash water over my face and chest. I think for a droll moment of working out. Then I resume my place on the couch, following the creak of the fan, the odd foolhardy cyclist whizzing by on the track below.
The wind sears my face awake. I’m sodden and sticky. I find myself incredibly aroused. The wind feels as though it’s passed through fire. I press my face into the cushion and reach for myself, drowsing into the familiar memory of Baby that one time. The habitual quickening. She came over to our house wheeling a large suitcase full of clothes to launder. Yes. These trips were timed so both our parents would be out working the night shift. My brother steered and shut her up in his room, not knowing I could hear their every other sound. At the end of the night she unloaded the dryer and folded her clothes into the suitcase.
‘Need any help with that?’
‘I’ll be right.’
‘You can carry it down the stairs?’
A flirtatious pause.
‘Sure, you can help me bring it down.’
I glided to the window and lifted the hem of the blinds. I was nearly seventeen. They left, as usual, by the small unlit walkway between the fence and my side of the house. And as usual, they tarried in the dark, swaying in and away from each other, whispering, and I cracked open the window to listen in from above.
‘So what’s the going tip
for a bellboy here?’ she asked.
Outside, the night was cool and a wind blew full and quiet along the empty street, carrying with it the scent of new flowers, jasmine and hibiscus and bougainvillea. A wood chime sounded from a neighbour’s porch.
‘Just a quick blow job,’ he said.
She spluttered out a low laugh, pushed and punched him. Then they kissed. She kissed him soft and then she kissed him hard, and after some abortive fumblings she spun around and folded herself over the standing suitcase. She wriggled her pants down to her knees.
‘Make it quick,’ her voice hissed.
He shoved down his own pants and grabbed her pale hips. He leaned and rocked over her. The wheels scrabbled wildly across the concrete but the suitcase stayed upright. From where I was watching all I could see of Baby was the side of her head, curtained off by her jogging black hair. She nodded and nodded and nodded and I watched. Finally they stopped, remaining locked together, almost statue-like. Then she unbent herself, bobbed her knees in a little curtsey, and reached between her legs with two fingers.
‘You,’ she said, grinning delightedly, jabbing her fingers at his chest, ‘are going to get me pregnant.’
He shushed her and automatically she looked around, scoping the street. Then she looked up—and saw me. I jerked back but didn’t dare release the blinds. After an appalling hesitation, she lowered her gaze, then straightened her clothes. She took possession of her suitcase handle. My brother stood there half-slouched and stupid. I ignored him. I watched instead the new self-consciousness in Baby’s body as she walked away—or did I imagine it?—leaning her weight forward, scraping and sledding her suitcase across the street.
‘I never want to see you again,’ my brother abruptly shouted into the night. ‘Take your stuff and get out of here!’
With a wicked smile she turned in our direction. ‘I’m never coming back!’ she called out. She heaved the suitcase into the boot and slammed it shut.
Something occurs to me from my childhood I haven’t thought about for years. After a particularly nasty beating, if I swore to tell our parents—and his bribes and proofs of contrition weren’t enough to dissuade me—my brother would threaten to run away. How strange that I now remember this with something like nostalgia. He would stalk to the closet and take out a suitcase and then he’d start packing it, leaving me mute-stricken as I tagged helplessly and furiously behind him, horrified by the thought of being responsible for his loss—and, far more deeply, of losing him. I’d break, of course, and agree to anything if only he agreed to stay. Was this what it was to love somebody? I guessed it had to be.
A few weeks after my brother’s open-air tryst with Baby, we received word that the Ngo brothers had been ambushed at the casino. The crew from that nightclub fight was responsible; they’d driven all the way in, we later learned, from Sunshine. The youngest Ngo, Peter, had had two of his ribs broken with a cricket bat. They’d been out with the Footscray crew from the same fight—the one with Baby’s red-capped ex—with whom they’d since become mates. Straight away there was talk of revenge, and soon enough there was another fight, at another Asian night, when Red Cap recognised one of the Sunshine boys. This time, knives were produced, and two people cut.
To Thuan and me, none of this, in itself, seemed critical. These fights happened all the time without ever reaching the hospitals, let alone the courts or headlines. The Ngos were known hot-heads. And everyone accepted that the club scene was booby-trapped with grudges and grievances, blood ties and vendettas and bonds of blind loyalty. Asian nights had been banned in Sydney for exactly this reason. The shock of what followed in this case lay mostly in the speed and savagery of its escalation. Afterwards, there was a fair bit of carry-on about who could have done what, when, to whom, to excite such action—but I’ll confess that, as irrational and unfair as it may sound, and though it can’t really be said to have presaged anything, as soon as Baby looked up that cool night, and commanded my eye, and showed me how dangerous her desire was, how matter-of-fact her recklessness, I knew right then I could no longer be shocked by anything that touched her.
For Thuan it was already too late. First, it emerged that she’d been in contact with Red Cap, her ex, all along—that in fact he was her on-again off-again dealer. I saw my brother’s face when he found out, felt the shock and deep retreat as though it were my own. He broke it off with her. She contacted me and pleaded her innocence. She was crying, and had never looked more beautiful. It was over, she said; she’d been clean the whole time, she said, and, still believing her, I passed it on. They reconciled. I was wracked with strong ambivalence seeing, even momentarily, my brother so vulnerable. A week later, a friend of mine spotted Baby in Sunshine with her other ex—the one who’d picked the first fight with my brother. I confronted her. At first she denied it, then she stopped short. It was impossible to go anywhere within a Vietnamese enclave without being marked—she understood that.
‘Okay,’ she sighed. ‘I went there.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘I heard—’ She paused, reconsidered. ‘Him and his mates are planning an attack. A big one.’
‘On who?’
‘Johnny. My ex. And all the rest of his friends. Your friends too—the brothers.’
We were in her car, on our way to pick Thuan up from somewhere, and she spoke straight ahead, into the busy windscreen.
‘You know this? You gotta tell them.’
‘I don’t know.’ She frowned, chewed at her lower lip. ‘I know him. He just wants to be the big man. That’s all it was, I just went there to ask him to stop all this.’
‘What’d he say?’
She glanced over at me, and there was a small, strange crease around her eyes I hadn’t seen before.
‘He said he’d think about it.’
‘Okay.’
She drove on a while, then, as though resolving some internal question, she swung her head from side to side. ‘Big T, he wanted me to beg.’
All my life I’ve been told I’m not very good at reading people. There is, I think, some truth to this. Baby, in particular, was so changeable that any attempt would usually be offside and out of step. But in that moment, I was inspired by an intense insight to say nothing, to sit still and let her ravelled thinking tease itself out. In my concentration my face must have lapsed into a frown.
She looked over, cringed slightly. ‘I guess you already know,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘Do you wanna pull over? Talk about this?’
‘I would love that.’
She pulled into a petrol station and parked by the air pump. Again, I waited for her to speak.
‘You’re sweet,’ she said nervously. She tilted the rear-view mirror down and checked her face. Then she told me how, when she’d gone back to plead with her ex, one thing had led to another. Not like that. But she still wasn’t sure how it had happened.
‘What happened?’
She paused. ‘I don’t want your brother to think I’m a slut.’ Her voice was small but quickly hardening. ‘That’s what he called me last time.’
We sat in silence as the car ticked. Slut. The word led me to the image of her bent over a wobbling suitcase, pants scrunched down to her knees. Sand and salt on her wet skin. The lie of the bikini on her body.
‘Yeah, but you did fuck him, didn’t you?’ I could feel my heart throttling my ribs as I thought this, and then, unbelievably—as I said it. Now the new word—the new image it called up—landed heavy and wet between us.
Baby jutted out her jaw. She jerked her head in my direction but didn’t look at me. ‘You can’t . . . Look, it’s not like I’m going out with you.’
‘Right.’
‘You can’t talk to me like that.’
‘Right. It’s not like he’s my brother. Like the last time you fucked around, who was it that patched everything up for you?’
She inhaled sharply. She said, ‘I screwed up.’ Then she turned to me, her fa
ce gone cunning. ‘But what’s the deal with you two anyway. What sort of fucked-up thing is that?’ Her skin was clenched tight around the eyes, her jaw muscles working her thoughts. ‘I don’t even know why he lets you follow him around. Almost like he’s scared of you or something. Like you’ve got something on him—the way you’ve got something on me—’cos that’s what you do, right, Big T? Spy on everyone? Get all the dirt?’
As she spoke, the space inside the hatchback seemed to shrink. It was as though everything real, dimensional, was happening here, inside, while the windows were actually screens broadcasting a program of outside movement and colour. In this enclosure I became acutely aware of her smell—sweat from where her body had kneaded the seat, the chemical tang of her shampoo.
Without thinking I reached for her.
She flinched. ‘I’m sorry,’ she coughed, then, somewhat unsteadily, she undid her seatbelt, leaned forward, and peeled her cardigan off. I realised her cheeks were wet. I didn’t know what I wanted. ‘Sorry,’ she repeated, and offered both her bare arms to me. She was sobbing now, quietly. And then I saw what it was she was trying to show me. The two dark mottled bands around her wrist, and two more around her biceps. The bruises yellow and orange and green, and myself enraptured and repulsed by them. The rot and ripe of them. Most strangely, I felt myself powerfully flushed with a sense that I only much later recognised—and ultimately accepted—as betrayal.
I told my brother a friend had seen her go into the ex’s house. I told him to ask her himself. I told him—thinking he’d be happy to hear it—that this ex was gearing up for a major attack against the Footscray crew. I told him my source was unimpeachable.
The day, finally, is cooling down when Thuan returns. He catches me half-naked in the kitchen. ‘I’ve washed up in plenty of kitchen sinks,’ he assures me. He’s carrying a slab of Carlton Bitter under one arm and holding a supermarket bag in the other. ‘Meat,’ he explains, ‘for the barbie.’
‘Where’d you go?’
He ignores me, sets the bag down, rips a couple of cans out of their tight 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.
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