We Were Not Men

by Campbell Mattinson

  And Bobbie said, ‘I hoped this wouldn’t happen.’

  Eden came out then and he looked distressed and Bobbie wound down her window but he came to my side. I kept my window wound up and I heard him say ‘Come on’ and I wound the window down and he said ‘Come on’ once again.

  We’d never taken turns, we’d done everything together, at the same time, both of us. I said, ‘It’s your chance now,’ as if all along the race we’d been in had actually been a relay.

  ‘The market’s never wrong,’ Bobbie said.

  And then soon after as we drove from our street she said, ‘I thought you’d be loyal.’

  I wanted to lock my mouth shut and to keep it that way. I broke open my lips though and through my teeth I said, ‘It’s him, not me.’

  Bobbie didn’t look at me, she kept looking straight ahead. She spoke just loud enough for me to hear. ‘To me,’ she said.

  *

  Bobbie thought I would hide out at Flowerdale and then return but I looked for a new school and stopped doing squad. I kept training in the creek each morning though Eden couldn’t come with me because I’d banned him from the farm. That creek, that cold skinny creek with the fragile ferns and the big strong trunks of gum. The water was cold, it always had been, but the air was cold now too, always in mist. It made me want to climb the hill on the other side and escape the valley as if my brother might be up there and not at arms. That creek, that happy place, that nowhere, that lonely stretch of water, those cold creek stones, everywhere those cold stones.

  *

  Werner’s. He’d invited me there. I walked up the pebble-rock road to his hill and I didn’t have shoes on because I’d just been in the creek and the soles of my feet were waterlogged but they didn’t hurt because I was used to it. Werner led me straight to the punching bag on the back verandah of his house. He threw me the frayed leather gloves and I strapped them on tight. I was tired from training and from everything else but I wanted to hit.

  ‘Punch with your legs,’ he said.

  I got straight into it. I whacked at the bag and every time I slowed he urged me on and pretty quickly there was sweat on the end of my nose. I whipped a glove at it but the sweat ran straight back down and I kept slamming at the bag not just because Werner wanted me to but because I did.

  ‘Twist,’ he said.

  ‘Harder,’ he pushed back at me.

  ‘I said turn,’ he said.

  ‘Control it,’ he kept saying. He had the bag dug into his shoulder and I threw hard punches but I couldn’t move him. I went on like this and then he stopped me – no words, just a hand motion – and he walked to pick up the other set of gloves, the ones Eden usually wore. He strapped them on. He swung the bag away then and faced me. He went to throw a light jab and it was probably meant as a warm-up but my hands were jumping and so I flew straight at him. I didn’t hate anyone and I didn’t want to imagine anyone’s head but the gloves were frayed and so was I. Before his punch reached me I’d clocked his cheek just like that. It wasn’t a great punch but it was a surprise and it moved him. It felt good to strike a blow.

  Werner shook his head. ‘Control it,’ he just said.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. I wanted to jump into him again and beat my fists fast as if I was in a fury.

  ‘Just get a fingernail in,’ he almost-yelled. He jabbed another punch at me and it didn’t look hard or have much wind-up but it landed and I felt my head shudder. I wanted to be hit or punished by him and so I egged him straight on. I moved in closer and threw a series at him and he batted me away but then I got another one in and it hit him. Again it felt good. ‘You boys have such fast feet,’ he said.

  I went to step back or to cover but before I’d had time he jabbed me in the head again but harder this time and it hurt because he was good and he was sharp. This time he followed his punch in and hit me so that my teeth rattled and then we clinched and it was good because my head was spinning or not right. His arms were around me and his head was close. I could feel the leather of his gloves on my shoulders. He took his hands away and tapped me on the chest and then he stepped away and faced me. He undid his gloves, clawed his shirt off, slipped his gloves back on. That dark straight scar running down his chest looked like a swimming lane. I should have stepped forward then but I held off because I couldn’t stop looking at his scar. I wondered how long ago it had happened. I couldn’t remember anything really about my dad’s body. Sweat still ran down my nose and maybe a little blood and that was when Werner spoke to me. ‘Swimming is a boulevard of broken teenagers,’ he said. I didn’t like him saying that, but even though I was groggy I knew that maybe it was.

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ I said.

  ‘They flog you hard and burn you out,’ he said.

  I thought then of fire and burning and distance. I thought of russet-brown hair left to dry out in the sun.

  ‘Control it,’ he said again, motioning me to punch.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  ‘You going to give up?’ he asked.

  ‘I want,’ I said. Or I started to say. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘We don’t grow up,’ he said. ‘We grow away and apart.’

  We started punching again but from a safer range. We didn’t say anything for a bit. Our gloves beat against each other as though we were doing the percussion for a song that was either building or trailing away. Then Werner stopped punching. He pushed the bare leather body of his gloves against the bare leather body of mine. ‘You still have time,’ he said.

  *

  ‘What’s the best school around here?’ I said to Bobbie as we drove into Kinglake to get milk.

  She squared and said, ‘For Christ’s sake, it’s not one size fits all.’

  Since I’d split off with Eden, I’d started taking even longer showers and it annoyed Bobbie especially now that I’d set up music in the bathroom too. ‘All this place smells of now is someone else’s shower,’ she said.

  Months went by, nearly a year. I kept apart from Eden. In those months I felt a comfort on the land at Flowerdale and in the company of Werner but I did not feel comfort with Bobbie. In fact I avoided her. I kept in my room or headed for the creek when I knew she was about to come and at meals I would answer questions but that was all I’d do. Bobbie hurried for all these months between Eden at Newport and me at Flowerdale and she had to cover hundreds of kilometres each week and as these months passed she seemed less and less to know where she should be. She kept forgetting things at the other house or asking me what day it was and a few times she called me Eden as if she’d become confused.

  I had days on end by myself at Flowerdale and in these days I walked the property and if Bobbie was there I’d sometimes walk out through the fields in the dark or in the rain. I spent time out along the creek and pulling potatoes but what I liked doing most was walking along the rows of vines because they were like lanes and I could do laps up and down them. I did this so often that I became attached to this vineyard and that made me wonder about the cellar. It was dank in there and dark save for the bulb lights and I’d never noseyed around in there but now I did. There were wire racks on walls with wine in them, though one wall had only two bottles left while the other wall was mostly full. When I pulled at them I found that the bottles on the full wall were from the seasons since Eden and I had arrived at Flowerdale but the two remaining bottles on the other wall were from the years before our time. This meant that Bobbie was only two bottles away from running out of the wine she’d made with Jack.

  *

  One day at Flowerdale the phone rang and it was the one person it shouldn’t have been. It was Carmelina.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  I wondered as this word settled in the air whether she really was, or whether she really should be. I liked this silence though, with Carmelina on the phone, and I let it stretch and then I said, ‘It’s okay.’

  She said, ‘Call him.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘He’s your t
win brother,’ she said.

  And I listened. I waited. I could hear a TV in the background. But we both said nothing. For a long time. And then Carmelina said, ‘It just happened. I didn’t mean it.’

  And I said, ‘Mean what?’

  And she said, ‘I didn’t even know that I could.’

  *

  I went through school terms and holidays and into new terms and I didn’t know many people at my new school and so every day I would sit and think of Eden. I didn’t know if I was still angry but I knew that I couldn’t face him. One day I was sitting in a school bus by myself, not talking to anyone, headphones on. I changed songs and there was a message on my phone. The Rio Olympics team had been announced.

  Eden wasn’t in it.

  *

  I clicked my phone screen off, stared straight ahead, imagined myself swimming a full fifty-metre lap of a pool, the heads sitting in front of me in the bus all blurred and swaying, and then I turned my phone screen on again.

  Eden hadn’t made it. He really actually hadn’t. My brother. My glorious twin brother.

  *

  I realised straight away that I’d been looking forward to bragging about him.

  *

  I’d wanted to tell people about the way orange emergency lights swung across the road on the night our mum and dad died, about the way morning sunlight rises on our creek, about The Warmies and its hot hard current, about Bobbie and Werner and Fuzzy and Geri. I wouldn’t yet tell people about Carmelina and how we’d both plugged our hearts into her, but one day I would. I’d wanted to mirror this story in the reflection of the gold medal around his neck. When I pictured this, I saw the flash of gold from the ribbon in Mum’s picture, the sun beaming out from her, Eden and me basking in her glow. I walked about the farm and into school on those days and weeks after, and instead of being alive with news and pride I stepped into the hole his non-selection had left. I didn’t feel down, I felt deflated. Eden and I had spiralled towards this moment from so far out and instead of him racing in that far-off Rio pool, we’d both now be at our homes, Eden at Newport and me at Flowerdale, staring at our phones, at nothing.

  *

  There were never any letters for me at Flowerdale but then one day not long after the Olympics there was one. It was from Geri.

  Shane Gould was the best freestyle swimmer the world has ever known. At fifteen years old, she simultaneously held the 100-metre, 200-metre, 400-metre, 800-metre and 1500-metre freestyle world records, a feat no one has ever matched. At sixteen, she won three gold medals, a silver and a bronze at the Munich Olympics. At seventeen, she retired.

  My sister Marjorie and I would both be dead if it wasn’t for your mother. When I was seventeen, we got in trouble while swimming at the back of the Crystals at Williamstown Beach. Your mother swam out to us but Marjorie and I were too much for her, or should have been. I’ve since read the stories of swimmers from all over the world but your mother is still the best freestyle swimmer my world has ever known. She could have given up. She could have helped just one of us. But she didn’t. She didn’t give up.

  The day your mother saved our lives she was seventeen years old. She was the same age you are now.

  I put the letter down and the first thing I did was crave my brother Eden. It was raining outside and heavy. I was at Flowerdale and Eden and Bobbie were at Newport and I didn’t want to be alone. I pulled on shoes and went down to the cellar and grabbed one of the last two old bottles. I headed then for the hill up to Werner’s house but instead of going down the drive I went up via the vineyard. As I walked I thought of our car accident and of the Monte Carlo biscuits crushed out there on the road. I thought of the baby-sized lump and of the hand with a teething rusk still stuck in it. When I reached Werner’s house, I held up the wine as if it explained something and I didn’t know what to say and I was all wet from the rain. I thought I would say something about Eden. When I spoke though, I said, ‘She’s not hopeless,’ and Werner nodded as if he knew exactly who.

  Werner didn’t say anything as I stood sopping wet on his porch. I pushed the bottle of wine at him and said, ‘Take this to Bobbie,’ as if the bottle or the wine inside it was magic and it would work.

  I don’t know why I thought this but as Werner stared at that bottle of wine I realised then and far too late that Bobbie had not allowed things to get serious with Werner because of our Grandpa Jack but also because of Eden and me. I realised then at the age of seventeen that Bobbie had taken us on with everything that she had, or even more, whether she had much to give or not. I had walked out on Eden and to a lesser extent on Bobbie too, but suddenly I felt desperate, more desperate than ever, to combine our calamities and to pull us back together. I said to Werner, ‘Will you take it to her?’

  I thought Werner would take that bottle to Bobbie in a heartbeat but instead he passed it back to me. The wine he’d held was a time capsule from a summer when not only Grandpa Jack was still alive but also probably Werner’s wife. ‘I’ve given up on her,’ he said, ‘and I’ve told her that. I told her last week.’ He paused then, as if he knew exactly what he would add, as if he’d already said it in his mind many times. ‘I’m at the stage now where, as hard as it is for me to give up on Bobbie like this, my life’s just going to get too hard if I don’t.’

  *

  I walked back down the hill from Werner’s house and the rain had not eased off and it wasn’t dark yet but it was almost. I held the bottle of wine to my chest because I did not want it to get too wet but it did anyway. I reached the front door of Bobbie’s house and I knew how lonely and empty the house would be and as I fiddled with the key I wondered what I’d do, how I’d fill in that night, whether I’d read Geri’s letter again. When my mum was the same age as me she’d been busy saving lives. I thought then that I might open the bottle and drink some of it, my first wine ever, and that I might do it alone. I played a picture in my mind then of our mum out the back of a beach with her arms around Geri and the sister I’d never met. As I pictured this, the bottle slipped from my hand and smashed against the hard stone of the doorstep. It was a red wine but it was not like blood and yet all around my feet it was dark and wet and vivid.

  *

  I didn’t want to talk to Bobbie or to tell her what I’d just done but before I’d even cleaned up I got straight on the phone and called her. I knew she wouldn’t answer. The phone rang a long time and I knew that Eden might answer and I thought if he did that I’d hang up, though I hadn’t properly decided. Truth was that if I’d heard his voice then I would have clung to it whether I’d decided to or not. Then Bobbie picked up. Even through the noise of rain on the roof I could tell that she’d been drinking. Before I had a chance to tell her about the bottle I’d broken she said, ‘I never wanted to say this out loud but you two are all I’ve got left of Jack.’

  We weren’t. She also had two bottles left of the wine they’d made together, though now she only had one. I decided not to tell her then. I asked her where Eden was and she said that he was out and I wanted to ask if it was with Carmelina but I didn’t.

  ‘This year,’ Bobbie said, ‘we all got older.’ As she said this I wondered if she was in fact drunk or whether she was tired or both. She sounded exhausted or drained or like she’d sunk so far into herself that she couldn’t see properly out. I asked because I felt I should, ‘When are you coming back to the farm?’

  Instead of answering this she said, ‘You probably don’t want me to teach you about wine.’

  I said, ‘Should I know?’

  She said, ‘You could just smell at it.’

  ‘I can smell it already,’ I said.

  I don’t know why she then said this but I think she must have misheard me. ‘We’re never ready,’ she said.

  *

  Over the years I had said or thought the words I came out first many times and when I put the phone down these words came to me again. Straight after, I thought that it was time, that I had to talk with Eden, that it was my res
ponsibility. I knew he was not home though, so I sat at the kitchen-end of the couch, the seat with the view. I always got that seat now. I realised as I sat in the quiet, dark house that every day I’d been apart from Eden I’d become a little more anxious. I feared then that something might happen to him before I made it back to him. I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing so I put bacon and eggs on the stove even though I didn’t feel hungry. I set the table for us. I could smell the rain in my hair and on my clothes, I hadn’t changed, though soon it was mixed with the smell of bacon.

  That was when the phone rang. Rain out the window, more than a storm. I fumbled with the pan and an egg fell to the floor, sunny side down. The phone stopped. I ran my hands under cold water. It rang again.

  It was my brother.

  Part V

  ‘We’re a love song,’ I said to him. As I said this, I knew that I’d just spoken the most honest sentence of my life.

  ‘Eden,’ I then said. I wanted to write his name down. I wanted to pass it on. I wanted my twin.

  ‘Mum,’ he just said. Because life could be distilled.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said. Suddenly I was frightened, shaking, everything.

  ‘Mum,’ he said again. Because we could break records and we could break us.

  ‘What would she think?’ he said.

  ‘Mum,’ I just said, I had to.

  *

  We arranged to meet the next morning but as soon as I put down the phone I texted him; I was allowed to again. I said, I’m coming now.

  I shoved a strip of hot bacon in my mouth and grabbed my bag, stepped over the broken bottle on the doorstep and strode in the direction of Werner.

  Now now? Eden texted back.

  Yes yes, I replied.

  Werner drove, I would have begged but I didn’t have to. There was so much water on the road that I could almost have got out and swum there. I’m coming, I texted to Eden again.

  I know.