We Were Not Men

by Campbell Mattinson

  I wished she would pause because then she might stop, but she kept going.

  ‘And now we have this new horribleness,’ she said. ‘So I guess I’d put another red circle, around now. You’re only nine and you’ve flushed the whole market out already.’

  She didn’t slur her words but her eyes were glassy.

  ‘But do you know what? I made a career out of rifling through the scraps that other people had left. This is one thing I know about. All the interesting stuff happens after the drama’s moved on.

  ‘So I’m looking at you and I’m thinking: I’m buying.

  ‘You understand what I’m trying to say?’ she then asked.

  I don’t know what I thought. But I know that I didn’t hesitate. I looked at Bobbie in the dark middle of that first night on her farm and with thoughts and words peppering the air I said, ‘When does Eden get out?’

  *

  Two weeks later. Bobbie made an effort this time. She asked me to round the bottles into the recycling as she fussed cereal packets and bread wrappers into the cupboards and wiped the kitchen benchtops.

  It was morning. The drive would take an hour. I scoffed down breakfast then bolted outside to make sure that Hemi had water. One weekend when Hemi was a pup we’d stayed with Bobbie and Grandpa Jack and Eden had been sick and that golden pup slept on Eden’s bed all weekend as if she loved us all plenty but she loved Eden more. Now Eden was coming. Had to find Hemi.

  But I couldn’t. I ran a full circuit of the house and into the woodshed, across the fields and along the driveway, behind the cupboards in the laundry. I looked at the front gate, its two white posts, as if she might already be there. ‘Where’s Hemi?’ I asked when Bobbie emerged. I looked again towards the front gate as if I expected that Hemi would just know.

  ‘Later,’ Bobbie said.

  ‘Eden,’ I said.

  ‘Later,’ Bobbie said again. She put a bag into the boot of the car and then slammed it or I felt as though she had.

  *

  Bobbie stopped at the barber on the way because it had been weeks and I needed it and maybe because I should look the same as I had before it happened. I didn’t want to be stuffing around with haircuts though. I went along with it but then I started whingeing and Bobbie turned to the barber and said that I was fractious and this annoyed me; I just wanted to be with my brother. I stood then and shed the cape thing and walked out with only half my hair cut. Bobbie called after me but I was going to get Eden.

  *

  All I wanted on that first time back to our home off Jubilee Street in Newport was to strip Eden’s Star Wars doona cover and bring it to him. While I was there in our quiet shell of a home though I went to the toilet and as I lifted the seat I saw a single hair resting on its rim. The strand was long and russet-coloured and it belonged to our mum. It was dry and stuck-down and I had seen strands of my mum’s hair before but never one that had been allowed to become dried and stuck-down. Bobbie grabbed clothes and cleared the mail as I wrapped Eden’s doona cover around my night-light.

  ‘I need to check your messages,’ she said, picking up our phone.

  She cradled the phone to her neck but then asked, ‘Do you know where your mum and dad kept their insurance files?’ Instead of waiting for an answer she lifted her empty coffee mug and said, ‘Is there a Birko here?”

  As she listened to the messages I felt at the cold metal slats of our gas heater, the place where Eden and I stood on winter mornings, our pyjamas on. What I most wanted to do was to head out the back to Mum’s vegie patch because I knew it would need watering, but I wouldn’t do it without Eden.

  Then we headed to the hospital. I hoped as we drove along our street that Mum and Dad would come running out. I wished that Bobbie would drive slower so that our street would last longer. ‘Do you have music?’ I asked. Bobbie jumped at the radio and flicked between stations but what I really wanted was music, outside, and lights, like the Mr Whippy van, to attract attention, in case Mum and Dad didn’t know we were there.

  ‘More townhouses,’ Bobbie quipped as we passed a For Sale sign.

  I opened my window to see out better and felt the cold smell of seaweed and salt pour in.

  We turned from our street and I wished then that Bobbie had made this visit later, after we’d collected Eden, so that we both could have picked a side and tracked every house and driveway, every car, up every tree.

  *

  It was only when I saw the hospital out the front windscreen of Bobbie’s car that I thought of Mum and Dad’s car and how it was smashed.

  ‘When will we get our car back?’ I asked Bobbie.

  ‘It won’t be back,’ she said.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘It wouldn’t mean anything,’ she said. ‘The location, I mean.’

  ‘Will they fix it?’

  ‘No.’

  I didn’t want to see our car again and yet I wished we were in it now and that it was fixed and that we could pick Eden up with it.

  ‘Use your words,’ she said.

  ‘I’m trying.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve been listening. It’s what parents say now.’

  ‘Our stuff’s in the car,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorting it,’ Bobbie said.

  ‘We have CDs in the player.’

  *

  ‘It’s against my religion to walk past a public toilet without using it,’ Bobbie said in the waiting room at the hospital. I sat alone with my half-cut hair and looked at the dull green hospital chairs with their plastic arms and I was the only one around so I stood up and rearranged some. Playing with these chairs made me think of kinder and of green apples and this made me think of Mum in her chair in the car and of how I’d moved her.

  ‘Shocking coffee,’ Bobbie said when she returned.

  *

  ‘Nice haircut,’ Eden said.

  We put his wheelchair in the boot. He always sat behind Dad but he went straight to my side as if it was normal. Once we were both buckled in the back seat I passed Eden his doona cover. I thought he might hug it to himself or say something but all he did was fold it roughly. ‘Sunny Boy,’ he said. This was a name Dad sometimes called me and now it had been said by Eden. ‘Did you get my Puffle?’ he asked as if it followed on.

  ‘I meant to.’

  ‘Probably good,’ he said.

  ‘I forgot.’

  ‘It’s safe at home,’ he said.

  I was desperate to talk but now that he was in the car I couldn’t think of anything. It was because Bobbie was there. It was raining outside though just barely which is how it had been on the night of the accident. We went under a bridge that we only drove through on our way to Grandpa and Bobbie’s house.

  ‘The bush?’ Eden finally said in the womb-like warmth of the car. Bobbie had stopped for petrol and Eden had waited for her to be gone.

  ‘You stepped straight into the car,’ I said.

  ‘You freaked out?’ he said.

  Suddenly I wanted to swap our seats back to normal but we were done now and we’d stay.

  But then Eden said, ‘Our car was like a washing machine.’

  I felt a shiver and it was good to shiver because it shook something free. In ICU at the hospital I’d felt desperate for sun or natural light but the outside world hadn’t been right without Eden.

  ‘They didn’t even have Nibble Nobby’s Nuts,’ Bobbie said as she got back into the car. ‘Why do you two look so happy?’ she said into the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Wait till you see the picture of Mum on the wall,’ I said to Eden. I said this because he’d been cooped up in hospital and I knew how desperate he’d be for sun.

  We travelled a bit and then Eden said, ‘I’m going to look like a dickhead in that wheelchair. Like, literally, a dickhead.’

  ‘Literally a dickhead?’ Bobbie said. I saw her look again in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Literally,’ Eden said.

  ‘I don’t think you know what literally mean
s,’ Bobbie said.

  Eden didn’t say anything at first but then he did and it made us laugh.

  ‘I don’t really know what dickhead means,’ he said.

  *

  I held a crumpet with blackberry jam and I stuffed my face with it just before tea. I looked about me that afternoon as I leaned on the kitchen bench and Bobbie was oblivious to us in a way that Mum never had been. It was still early but she’d already started on wine.

  ‘Feels weird here without Hemi,’ Eden said.

  Bobbie said, ‘Don’t wait for me to offer you more food. You’re not guests anymore.’

  I waited for Eden to reply but before he could Bobbie took the jam jar from the table. ‘Not with your virgin teeth,’ she said.

  *

  Eden finally in the bed beside me at Bobbie’s. A wind storm had rolled in and branches chattered against the windows, the walls. We were in the back bedroom where the walls were flimsier than the rest of Bobbie’s house.

  Eden said, ‘Worst-case scenario is ideal.’

  And the words hung in the air.

  Until I said, ‘Is that a song?’

  And he said, ‘It’s going through my head.’

  ‘I think Mum liked it,’ I said.

  And he said, ‘Do you miss Mum?’

  ‘Worst-case scenario is real,’ I said. ‘I think it’s “real”.’

  ‘Ideal,’ he said.

  ‘She sings “real” in the song.’

  We lay with doonas up to our chest because it had got cold though Eden had half a leg outside his doona and so I did the same. He looked around the room and said, ‘It smells dusty here.’

  ‘It smells bad,’ I said.

  ‘I haven’t read any of the books on these shelves,’ he said.

  He looked at the bare wall by his bed and added, ‘Should we move Mum’s picture in here?’

  And I wanted to but I said, ‘It wouldn’t be fair.’

  And he said, ‘I wonder how old she was then.’

  ‘We’ve read some of the books,’ I said.

  ‘We’re sleeping in a room full of books that aren’t ours,’ he said.

  ‘The Poky Little Puppy,’ I said. ‘Mum read it to us.’

  ‘The poky what?’ he said smirking.

  ‘There was a hole in the fence,’ I said, trying to remember the story. ‘For the puppy to go through.’

  ‘The puppy keeps getting out,’ he said.

  We sat in our beds and listened to the quiet and then we heard the sound of a frog.

  ‘It’s not the city,’ he said.

  ‘I heard cows before,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not ready for a new mum,’ he said.

  ‘She’s our grandma.’

  ‘She’s trying,’ he said.

  ‘We don’t wake up from this,’ I said.

  I listened to him breathe and it was soothing. ‘I like ideal,’ he said.

  *

  The best thing about Bobbie’s farm is the creek at the back. Eden should have rested but we begged and Bobbie allowed us to go. I wheeled Eden across the paddocks and over the bumpy red soil. We were alone out there in the long dry grass as we so often had been but it felt more alone there now than it had.

  Eden waited until we were clear. ‘What’s she done with Hemi?’ he asked. The afternoon light. It wasn’t summer, it had ticked over to autumn and the light then was orange or turning.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know.’

  ‘We need Hemi now.’

  ‘I looked for her,’ I said.

  I wheeled Eden through the bush and the leaves crackled beneath his weight and then he asked, ‘Is Bobbie crazy?’

  ‘She’s weird,’ I said.

  ‘I hope she doesn’t freak out,’ he said.

  We reached the creek and stopped at the drop-off. We’d been there only a few weeks earlier but we were different now. Since we’d last visited a gum had fallen and it lay across the creek and formed a semi-dam. The tree must have been weak or rotten on the inside, though I looked at its huge wide trunk and wondered how something so big could fall down. I went to touch the tree but Eden wanted me to wheel him onto and along it. Every time he saw water he wanted to stare down into it.

  ‘We’ll race that way,’ he said pointing upstream. ‘Against the current.’

  ‘We race the other way.’

  ‘This tree changes it,’ he said.

  ‘Not that much.’

  ‘It smells of eucalyptus,’ he said.

  When he said eucalyptus I thought of wool mix and washing. I picked up a stick and threw it in the water and we watched the current take it.

  ‘It’s still flowing,’ I said.

  ‘It’ll make us stronger.’

  ‘Or drown us.’

  He looked at me then. ‘You don’t seem too bad,’ he said. I heard these words as if listening to the sound of my own breathing. Before I could answer he added, ‘The air smells so different here.’

  I put my hand on the tree and it felt solid and the moss felt alive even though the tree itself was dead. I’d let go of the wheelchair and was about to step along the tree when to my astonishment Eden rocked his wheelchair and bumped it forward. I did not twig to what he was doing and before I’d worked it out he’d tipped himself out and into the water. In his clothes. With his injuries. The creek wasn’t deep but it was deep enough and he didn’t just fall, he started to swim, underwater, as fast as his injuries would allow. He had pins in both his back and his legs and he had months of physiotherapy ahead but he didn’t care, he just hit the water and swam. I looked at him and I did not think that he would drown but I felt scared, I just did. I did not like that I had not seen this coming. He was my twin. He came to the surface and looked around as if taking it in but he didn’t look at me and then he ducked back under. Into a deeper section. He dipped further under this time. He moved so far out and under that I lost sight of him. I thought I knew exactly where he had gone but when he didn’t reappear I looked to other parts of the creek as if he could be anywhere. He was under so long that the surface of the water broke clear and still. I stood by myself on the bank and the air smelled of eucalyptus but it was quiet. I felt like an idiot standing there. I was meant to be the more able one. I didn’t want to dive in but I didn’t want to be left there by myself. I had an urge then and it was strong and it was to catch up. Suddenly I wanted to put my head down and reach into the dark depths of shaded creek water. I would claw to him if I had to. I pulled off my jumper and t-shirt and another gaping hole had opened in me and it could only be filled by Eden. I thought then as I stepped towards the creek of Mum and of her swimmer’s body. I felt the mud and the cold stones and the water on my feet and up between my toes. I had to reach Eden. I dived in and the water was freezing and I went under. I swam to the surface and fast. I shot down the cold dark creek and Eden resurfaced and when he did my heart jumped. He had his back to me. I reached him and clung my arms to him. My ribs were squealing because of the cold and because of my injuries too. I felt Eden’s skin on mine and I could have cried into him but I didn’t. I tried to laugh because it would have been good to. I looked and our feet had stirred the creek bed and the water around us was now murky but still the water ran on because that was what the creek did, it kept running. Eden had not yet properly turned to me but I said, ‘You’re crazy.’ My voice sounded shaky but the water was cold and that could have been why.

  ‘How?’ he just said. He said this as if he’d just watched the sun break out from behind the moon.

  ‘This is it,’ he then said.

  ‘This is what?’ I asked.

  ‘It,’ he repeated. Our arms were still about one another but then he moved and broke free or free-enough for him to spin around.

  I looked at my twin brother’s face. He had changed so much from only a minute or so before. He was different now, I don’t know how but he was definitely different.

  I moved and swam around him then. His face looked white and dazzling in the cool d
ark. His face had become so bright that he looked in a kind of rapture. We ducked under again and swam and I tired before him though it should have been the opposite. After a time, I propped myself on a log and Eden kept swimming and I knew as I looked on that he did not want to leave and that he would swim into the night and through to morning if he could. He reacted to the water that day and I did not but I reacted to him. He looked up to me then and said, ‘Can you hear it?’

  And I said, ‘Hear what?’

  And he went to talk or to explain and it must have seemed ridiculous. He duck-dived under and he was inside the water again. I watched him appear and go back under and he did this over and over as if the water was telling him something and he had to hear it, he just had to.

  *

  ‘You’re at a high risk of pneumonia,’ Bobbie said as she rushed to us, not angry. She gathered towels and blankets. ‘The trick is,’ she said, ‘to match your abilities to your stupidities. It’s important for boys.’

  *

  ‘Mum would have been angry,’ I said. To Eden. In the bathroom. The steam. Drying myself. Eden stood under the shower with a hand propped on the tap, the water brilliant and hot.

  He didn’t say anything at first but I saw again that with his free hand he’d drawn on the wet steamed glass of the shower screen. A rectangle. With lanes. Like a pool. He had drawn lanes just as he had in the car that night.

  ‘She would have understood,’ he said.

  ‘That you’re stupid?’ I said.

  ‘That I was in hospital longer than you.’

  *

  ‘An old tree’s smashed down near the cornfield,’ Bobbie said coming in from outside, gumboots pulled off at the door. We were in front of the TV. PJs already on. Cuts of red apple on blue plastic plates. ‘Put your dressing gowns on.’

  I wheeled Eden out in sheepskin slippers and with rugs around our shoulders. Bobbie’s farm wasn’t big but it was divided. A potato plot, the square field of corn, the vineyard, the vegies, the cool beneath the apple trees, hazelnut trees in the back corner. Bushland on three sides, the slim cold creek, the Kinglake-Yea road. We went to the cornfield and plucked ears of white corn while Bobbie pulled spuds from the soil. The fire was already going in the belly of the fallen tree. Tinfoil jackets and straight into the coals. Bobbie had the butter ready.