Barracuda

by Christos Tsiolkas

  ‘What’s been happening?’

  ‘Same as you, mate. I broke up with Annalise. It’s been nearly two months and it still kills me, it still fucking does.’ Theo was peering through a tangle of golden curls. ‘Is it the same with you?’

  Dan then noticed the heavy shadows under the younger man’s eyes, the sharp, gaunt lines of his jaw and his cheekbones. He wasn’t sleeping, Dan thought, and he wasn’t eating. Dan went and sat on the concrete step just below Theo. He wanted to put a hand on his brother’s knee, just to touch him—he knew that more than words, touch could speak. But he didn’t know if his brother wanted it; he feared that Theo would recoil from it.

  He didn’t know Annalise, had never met her.

  ‘How about you?’ Theo’s question was an appeal. ‘Does it still hurt not being with Clyde?’ Theo needed to not feel alone with his hurt.

  ‘I wasn’t in love with Clyde,’ Dan said. ‘I realised I wasn’t because of how relieved I was when it ended.’ He didn’t touch Theo; he leaned down and ran his fingers through the unmown grass. ‘I think meeting Clyde brought me back into the world.’ Dan could feel his cheeks burning, his heart racing. ‘You know, after fucking up so badly, ending up in prison.’ The next words were the hardest, they laboured to come forth from deep in his belly, from within the very cells of his blood. ‘You know,’ he continued, his voice husky, ‘after failing at swimming, after failing at everything.’ He was shivering, but not from cold. He couldn’t look at his brother, couldn’t bear what he might see there. ‘I mean, failing all of you.’ He stopped, drank some beer to cool his mouth and tongue and throat. His whole body was burning.

  On the other side of the fence a sensor light switched on, a yellow glow, and an old man was calling out, ‘Pssh psssh, Caruso, where are you?’ Both brothers laughed as a slim tabby cat jumped out from the bottom of the garden and scaled the fence.

  ‘So the Rizzos are still next door?’ Dan’s voice was back to normal.

  Theo nodded, scraping the butt of the joint on the sole of his sneaker and flinging it into the garden. ‘Well, I fucking loved Annalise and I still do. And you didn’t fail me, you dumb fuck—not when you didn’t make it as a swimmer. You failed me when you left us, when you wanted nothing to do with us. That’s what fucking hurt.’

  I want to run away, Dan thought. I can’t bear this, the crush of it, the shame of it. But he just sat there. He would not get up, he would not leave. He was alert to it now, how the shame began in the belly, how bile flooded his insides, seeped into his blood. He was aware that the anger, the poison inside him needed to escape, as if his shame could transform into wrath and he could spew it all out, turn on his brother, wring his brother’s bloody neck: It wasn’t about you, I couldn’t think about you, I was drowning and I was falling, I was plunging down to earth and I couldn’t think of you, or of Mum, or of Dad, or of Regan, or of anyone. He could spring up from the cold stone of the step, smash his brother’s face, wring his neck: It wasn’t about you, you little cunt, I was falling. I was drowning. The excuses and the defences came to his lips—he was ready, to strike, to run; his muscles tensed, his jaw clenched. Dan turned to his brother.

  Theo was a young man now, an adult; his hands were callused and large, his skin was the darkest shade of honey from the sun. He was scratching the inside of his arm, something he had always done whenever he was nervous or afraid.

  Dan could smell the eucalyptus, the old tree at the back of the garden, its bark shining silver in the light of the moon, its canopy gleaming golden from the light of the street lamps. He released his breath. ‘Mate, I’m really sorry for what I did. I’m really sorry for hurting you.’

  The two brothers sat in silence on the steps. Finally, Theo put his hand on Dan’s shoulder, then flicked a finger hard at the back of his head, so hard it hurt. The younger man cackled and slapped his knee, enjoying Dan’s outrage. ‘Evens?’

  Dan couldn’t help laughing at the infantile term, the word that brought back childish skirmishes and teasing. ‘Yeah, OK, we’re even.’

  He got up from the step, stretched his arms out into the night sky, he breathed in the air. ‘It smells wonderful,’ he marvelled, ‘the eucalyptus and the pure night air.’ He was being reminded that it wasn’t just the horizon, not just the light, but even the sounds and smells in Australia that stretched to the infinite.

  Theo snorted. ‘You’re an idiot. All I can smell are the fumes off the bloody highway. What the fuck is so wonderful about that?’

  Dan then said, ‘Tell me about Annalise.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’ Theo’s tone was hesitant, sulky.

  ‘What does she look like?’

  Theo went into the house and came out holding a laptop. He sat back down on the step and Dan came to sit beside him again as his brother turned on the computer. The screen was white, then blue, and then an image washed across it: Theo and a young woman. She had smooth pale skin, her mouth was serious and unsmiling, her eyes were solemn and gently hooded—they dominated her face. Theo was smiling, his hair much shorter. Dan could see the adoration in his brother’s eyes, the limpid submission in them as he pulled her into him. Her eyes gave nothing away, but he could tell exactly what his brother was feeling at the moment the photograph had been snapped. Annalise had not allowed the camera to glimpse anything of her.

  ‘She’s beautiful.’

  ‘Yeah, tell me about it.’ Theo’s voice broke, and then he slammed down the top of the computer. ‘So now you’ve seen her.’ His voice was distant.

  ‘Are you seeing each other at all?’

  ‘She’s visiting family in Townsville. She’ll be back next week.’

  Dan could hear the choke in his brother’s voice.

  ‘But she doesn’t want to see me, she reckons it’s best that we don’t see each other for a while.’

  Dan didn’t think there was anything to say. Words wouldn’t do Theo, couldn’t do Dan himself any good.

  Theo pulled out a pouch of tobacco and began rolling another joint. Dan stared up at the dark sky, the distant tremor of the stars. It felt like looking at the ceiling of the world, he thought to himself, it was so much higher here than it was in Europe. Here the stars had to exert themselves, had to struggle harder to shine their light.

  Only after the first puff of the joint did Theo speak again; the nicotine and marijuana steadied his voice, pushed back the tears of rage and longing. ‘How did you realise you weren’t in love with Clyde? How did you know?’

  Because I can’t see him. Because I can’t recall his eyes, his mouth, his skin, his cock, his balls, I can’t picture his stride, I can’t hear his voice, I can’t bring back the smell or even the taste of him. Because of how quickly he has gone from me.

  ‘Because I don’t miss him.’

  ‘But that’s now.’ Theo’s tone was insistent, as though Dan could tell him something that could make his pain bearable. ‘Did you realise you didn’t love him when you were with him? Do you think you ever loved him?’

  Martin Taylor’s voice was a deep vibrato from the back of his throat, a man’s voice even in youth; he had a pronounced cleft in the middle of his chin—Dan could remember that clearly, how he wanted to place his finger exactly there. He could see the splash of sandy-coloured hair under Martin’s arms, wet and splayed across his fine, pale skin, skin that was flushed and pink after a swim. The stone-grey transparency of his eyes, the fixed assurance of that gaze. And Martin’s smell, a drug composed of all the boy’s emissions, heady, almost hallucinatory, the smell of his body and the smell of chlorine. In the night, Dan could smell him, he could smell Martin Taylor. He could remember everything about Martin Taylor.

  ‘No, I don’t think I ever loved him.’

  ‘Then why the fuck did you stay with him? Why the fuck would you go all the way to Scotland for him?’ Theo’s tone was unsteady again, the languid pull of the drug fighting the rage inside.

  It came to Dan: she had never told him that she loved him, she’
d never given him that.

  ‘I didn’t go to Scotland for him,’ Dan answered, as he saw it all with clarity, shocked at the severity in his voice, the ruthless calm of the truth. ‘I went for myself.’

  Theo shook his head, not comprehending.

  Dan sighed. Would he only ever feel the burden of words? He had spent the previous six months in virtual silence, alone in London, knowing no one, having no one. All he’d had was silence and he’d been content with that. Now he was back to the treachery of words—what to say and what to withhold, what to create and what to destroy.

  What to create.

  ‘I had a future,’ Dan found himself saying, and he was astonished as the words began to flow: the sounds were coming out first—that was what shocked him—and then words were forming from the sounds, the words and the sentences and the meanings were originally sounds, originally breath. ‘I had a future, and I was going to be one of the greatest swimmers that ever was and I wasn’t good enough and it had nothing to do with talent or skill or my body—it had to do with who I was. I just wasn’t good enough. All I had was that future and when that future was stripped from me, there just wasn’t anything else there—and I’m sorry that even you, even all of you, all my family, you weren’t enough. There was nothing but this hole and all I was was just this hole. All I knew how to do was swim and all I wanted to do was swim and I couldn’t ever swim again, so I was just this hole where a man should be, and I hated myself for not being strong enough and not being good enough. I don’t give a fuck what everyone says about how all I could do was give it my best shot, and how not everyone can be a winner, and not everyone can achieve their dreams. That’s bullshit—without my dream, I was just a hole, an absence, that’s all I was. I failed; the failure was within me and all I knew was that I wasn’t strong enough so I was just floating. My whole life was floating and that’s what I never could bear about the water, just floating on it—what I loved about swimming was that I could fly in it, it wasn’t liquid for me, it was air. So Clyde came along and he kept me afloat and he wanted to go back to Scotland and that too kept me afloat, and Glasgow was alright, Glasgow could even be home, but I was still empty and only floating, and Clyde knew it, Clyde could see it and he began to hate me for it, because how can you love an emptiness? And then one day we were in this place called Luss, this fucking freezing loch in the Trossachs, and it was summer and the place was full of holidaying Scots having a great old time. I looked out at the water and it was calm and still and I knew it was deep enough to kill me if I wanted it to and I just stripped off my clothes and I dived in there and I swam for the first time in years, as fast as I have ever swum, and even though the water was so cold it was squeezing my lungs and my heart, I kept on swimming because I wanted to fly and because I was sick of being nothing. And then I just stopped, I just stopped swimming and the people on the shore were calling out to me and I could hear Clyde shouting for me and I just lay on my back in this icy, Arctic water, thinking, Let it fill me up, let me not be a hole, and nothing happened, nothing changed. I realised then that there was nothing left of my dream to lose, so I just turned around and headed back to the shore. People were staring at me and Clyde was drying me, going, “What were you doing, man? What the fuck were you doing?” and I was just standing there and I thought, Well, I’ve swum, and I’ve been so terrified of swimming and I’m still here and I am still empty and swimming won’t take me back to my future and my future begins now. Clyde was asking if I was alright, calling me a mad bastard, and I said to him, “I don’t want to stay here, mate, I can’t. I want to go back home,” and he said, “I cannae go back with you, Danny,” and that’s how it happens, Theo, that’s sometimes what just happens. You can’t dream the same future. I didn’t know what the future was going to be but I knew it wasn’t going to be in Glasgow and Clyde knew his wasn’t going to be here and realising that, understanding that, was more important than the question of whether I was or was not in love.’

  Dan breathed in the eucalypt, the scent of wattle.

  Theo was silent; he had let the joint burn down to the end, and now he flicked it across the yard.

  Dan opened his mouth, but now that he had let the words loose, let them run, he could feel the old caution return. This is a story, Theo, he could have said. I’ve just told you a story. The truth he knew abounded with sound, a pulse beating to infinity, an ocean of only waves; there was too much sound to be trapped in words. Dan shut his mouth.

  ‘Maybe you’re searching too hard, mate.’ Theo’s voice was also wary, he too was trying to catch sound and trap it into words. ‘Maybe Clyde is enough? Maybe if you just gave it time, you’d find that being with Clyde would fill that hole? Isn’t that possible?’

  Dan knew he could break his brother now, the way you squashed ants, breaking backs and souls with the press of a finger. Annalise doesn’t want you, bro, you’re not enough for her. He could crush him if he wanted to.

  ‘It’s not going to happen, Theo. It’s over.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’m a thirty-year-old man and I’m not sure about anything. That’s the only thing I know—that I’m still not sure of anything.’

  With a shudder—from the winter chill? from Dan’s words?—Theo got up. The laptop was sitting on the step. ‘You can check your emails if you like. The connection’s stuffed out here but you can log on in the kitchen.’

  ‘I don’t need to, thanks though.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Theo rolled his eyes. ‘You know you never answered one of my emails?’

  Was this another thing to be sorry about, another reprimand to bear?

  ‘Not that it matters, mate, truly.’ Theo’s tone was conciliatory, tender. ‘It was kind of nicer to get the postcards. I really looked forward to your postcards.’

  ‘I liked writing them.’

  ‘See you in the morning, bro.’

  ‘See you.’

  Theo was still standing nervously in the doorway. He then stepped down and offered Dan the most blundering but earnest of hugs, from behind, his arms tight around his brother’s chest. Dan could smell him, the sweat and the tobacco, the dope and the soap on his skin. Theo let go of him and went back up the steps and opened the screen door. But he still didn’t go in, he kept the door ajar with his foot.

  ‘Are you still planning to drive up to see Regan on Saturday?’

  Dan nodded. He’d come home to see Regan.

  ‘I’ve been working like a dog, mate, everyone in this city is building an extension or renovating or building apartments.’ Theo was hesitant, shy. ‘If you want, I can drive up with you. Nowra’s a long drive—we could share it.’

  Dan had been dreaming of being alone on the open road, where the expanse of sky and the earth reached to the end of the universe. He had been looking forward to driving it alone, heading for that sky on his own.

  But he heard the question and the plea in his brother’s voice and he said, ‘Yeah, of course, that would be great.’

  Dan took his brother’s laptop into the kitchen. He sat at the table with his finger hovering over the keyboard, over the mouse, to enter Safari or Firefox, to answer that siren call, that infernal music, the spinning electrons, the percussion of information. His finger hovered over the mouse and then he decided, banging on the keyboard, entering a portal, the spinning letters on the screen forming the word google. For the first time in his life he was going to put in his name, he was going to search for his name. He had never let himself do that before, knowing what he would find, that the record of his shame would be there for all to see: the details of his failure, of his fall—what he did, how he was punished. It would all be there, the tantrum in the pool in Japan, the howling selfish boy, the degradation, the awful failure. He would type in the words Daniel Kelly, swimmer, and then would be shame and infamy and revulsion. He held his breath. He typed: Daniel Kelly, swimmer. The electrons sparked and the screen transformed, he was astounded by the speed of the machine. He read down the list with drea
d; there was a Dan Kelly in the US and there was a musician and an architect and he read about a family reunion of a woman called Margaret Kelly somewhere in Canada. Though he scrolled and scrolled, though he tapped the keys again and again, there was no record of him, no evidence. There was nothing about him at all.

  At that moment he realised that it hadn’t all been about being better and faster and stronger; that hadn’t been all he’d wanted. It had also been to make a mark, to be a photograph and an image, to be a record and a name. To be a name. There was no mark and there never would be. No one knew his name.

  Dan could feel the blood rushing violently to his cheeks. With a savage strike he hit quit and the electrons danced. The photograph of his brother and Annalise glimmered there, the colours sharper than life, the intensity of a child’s painting, and this time softly he tapped buttons and the photograph briefly shimmered before the colours washed away. The screen was blue and then it was white and then it was black. All that remained was his face reflected in the glass.

  When Dan awoke, his brother had already left for work, and so had his mother. It was just him and his father in the house. His dad was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper, wearing a Collingwood sweatshirt and his pyjama bottoms. Dan could see his granddad Bill in his father’s features. A record was playing in the lounge room, an old song that Dan recognised from his earliest days. Help me, information, get in touch with my Marie. His father looked up, nodded at him, abruptly folding the paper and pushing it aside.

  ‘Do you want a coffee, son?’ he asked, then added, ‘This country’s fucked, mate. I don’t know why you came back.’

  Dan watched his father rinsing the espresso pot at the sink. The years of long-haul driving were starting to show: there was a stoop to the man’s shoulders, and though his limbs were still thin and sinewy, his middle and his buttocks had ballooned. It was this disparity in the man’s shape, the body parts that somehow didn’t quite fit, that made Neal Kelly finally an old man.