by Cate Kennedy
My brother believed that nothing could make you ridiculous if you were strong. His way was to go at things directly; entering a new school, for example, he would do what movie lore says to do upon entering jail: pick a fight – and win. I wondered what he did in jail. Our father, in his own way, failed to beat this into us, and so my brother beat it into me. I thought then I hated him for it but I was wrong. I wanted to know him – I always have. Now I realise it was only when he asserted himself in physical motion – then, ineluctably, in violence – that I came closest to doing so.
I am on the street of my childhood. I am running late, without any time to scavenge through the disused paddock, veer in and out from under lawn sprinklers – even to catch a breather at the bottom of our steep hill. He’s by himself, waiting for me. Both our parents at work. I’m late, and when I come in the front door he’ll punish me – those are his rules, and they’re clear enough. I come in and there he is, right in front of me, his face almost unbearably inscrutable. He allows me time to put down my schoolbag and deadlock the door. I fumble off my shoes. The hot cord bunches up from my gut into my throat, clogging my breathing. I lift my arms to my face and he slubs me with a big backhander.
‘Where’ve you been? You’re late.’
I nod, lick my cracked lips, crabwalk quickly into the living room. He follows me to the couch where I hunch my back and bury my face in the dark red cushion. Over and over he hits me, his knuckles pounding the hard part of my head where I won’t bruise. The cushion smells of old blood, and spit, and sweat from both our bodies. If I reach behind to feel for the arm, the punishing fist – try to glove it with my own smaller, sweaty palms – he’ll twist and sprain my fingers. If I turn to plead, I’ll meet his face absent of heavy intent, as if his attention is somewhere else, as if he’s bashing my skull to reach something just beyond it. He’s utterly without pity and in my stronger moments I envy that. I’m sorry, I tell him. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. He drives his knee into my lower back. At the height of panic and pain something comes free in me. Afterwards, I wipe my face on the cushion and try not to track blood, if there is blood, all over the carpet. I search my reflection in the bathroom mirror. If there’s visible damage, he’ll barter with me, he’ll let me off next time, he’ll do my chores, buy me jam doughnuts at the tuckshop – so long as I don’t dob him in. But only rarely are there visible signs.
‘What happened?’ Mum asks. She’s had a long day and her face is closed and loose.
‘Nothing.’
She pauses. ‘I’ll tell your dad.’
I look at her scornfully. Even she knows that doesn’t deserve an answer.
One of the common tacks in media accounts of my brother, I noticed – beyond the routine designation of ‘monster’ – was to call attention to his inscrutability. None of the other culprits merited such consideration. The Ngo boys, for instance, always looked thuggishly guilty. But courtroom reporters and sketch artists described, artfully and self-consciously, their failure of scrutiny in the face of Thuan Xuan Nguyen; a face typically depicted as ‘smooth’, or ‘mask-like’, on someone whose very name rebuffed pronunciation in each of its three syllables. I could understand their frustration. My brother was a person in whom deep faults ran, yet always he seemed to conduct them into something like charisma. All my life I never judged him; to me he represented the fulfilment of my own genomic seed and tatter. I never suspected, after all that happened, at the trial and beyond, that complete strangers might also be capable of my reservation. This is not to defend what he did. This is to say I understood, completely, the media’s macabre, manic insistence on the details of that night. The facts of the matter. The altercation and eviction from the nightclub. The first victim chased down and hacked to death by a gang wielding machetes, meat cleavers and samurai swords. The sickening count of wounds on his body. Victims two and three fleeing into the Yarra, carried by the water approximately 200 metres to the west – shadowed alongshore by the gang. One with gashes on his wrists and forearms, three fingers missing below the knuckle, from a presumed attempt to return to shore. Chances are you may recall these details. The sober-faced, riverside TV reports, the strongly worded declarations by members of the mayor’s office, the Homicide Squad, the Asian Squad – while in the wintry background, day on day, the grieving families held vigil, wailing in Vietnamese as they proffered incense sticks, lit and let go of tissue paper. You may have even heard me speak, in one of my presentations, about this incident. Most people recognise my brother only through one of his tabloid nicknames: the Meat Cleaver Murderer. He was there on the bank that night. Here’s what most people won’t know – what I’ve never spoken about: I was there with him.
*
When it gets light my brother showers and heads out. I laze on the couch in the living room, windows open but curtains drawn, shirtless in front of the rickety fan, rolling a chilled glass bottle of water back and forth across my chest. Otherwise, I try not to move. When the phone rings, it’s Mum – one of her friends has just spotted Thuan on Victoria Street. Is it true? Has he come back?
I’m waiting for him when he returns. We have to go visit Mum, I tell him. He stops, then nods, puts his sunnies back on. Outside, the air is so hot it immediately dries out my lungs; I can feel the bitumen boiling through my sandals. This is a killing sun. We walk south, through the Abbotsford chop shops and factories, the streets made slow, strange with heat vapour, the sudden assaultive glare of metal surfaces. People move, then pause in scant shadows. On the main street the tramlines look as though they’re liquefying. Too hot to think, let alone speak, we make our way towards the high-rise flats.
‘Child?’ our mother asks when she opens the door. She’s wearing brown silk pyjamas and there’s absolutely no sweat on her face.
‘Hello, Ma.’ My brother touches her shoulder for a second. She reaches up and cups his ear, then turns to smile at me.
When our father died I advised her to sell the house and car and move here – the flat was government-subsidised, located in the heart of a Vietnamese neighbourhood. During that period she was used to doing whatever I said. I see, looking back, it must have been hard going for her – moving from a family home with yard, driveway and garden to living alone in an inner-city warren sentried by closed-circuit cameras. Up urine-doused lifts and down fumigated corridors. Since then, though, she’s grown to like it. She likes the proximity to her new circle of friends, to Victoria Street a block away, and – a few blocks behind that – to me. After all that happened, I sometimes wondered how her friendships suffered – I loathed the thought of her being judged by that array of flat faces and slit eyes, besieged by their silent, hostile curiosities – but of course she’d never have discussed any of that with me.
The dining table, predictably and yet astonishingly, is covered with food. Mum comes out of the kitchen with a jug full of mint leaves and cut lemon halves. She pours our drinks, enquires after my herb garden, brings out a colander brimming over with fresh basil and purple mint and coriander. She’ll send some cuttings home with me, she says; the residents picked the community garden clean due to the drought. Every now and then, as she speaks, she’ll stop to look at my brother.
‘You’ve been in the sun,’ she says. She wets a cloth under the kitchen tap and lays it across the back of his neck.
We eat with courteous gusto. These are all our favourite dishes: spring rolls, shredded chicken coleslaw, a plain winter melon soup offset by caramelised salty pork. My brother doesn’t talk, so neither do I. The silence becomes the outside wind: up here on the eighteenth floor it’s a constant commotion, driving dust and sound through the metal window jambs, shaking the very light. Every so often I see smallish cockroaches stopping, as though disoriented, in the middle of their skitterings. Oblivious, we eat, and before we’re done with any given dish Mum carts it off – brings forth a new one. For a moment it’s as though we’ve ducked out from our nearer past; we’re back in our St Albans kitchen, nothing to say, waiting
for Mum to finish up. Not knowing it would chase us all down – this past still in front of us. Then, she cooked and we ate. Later, she sat down and couldn’t stand up again in a Victorian Supreme Court public toilet, her eldest son counted push-ups in his cell, body wet with heft and speed, I stood in front of strangers and spoke them both down into small dots of sense. Later, she sat with her back straight and head bent, I stood in front of people and delivered up her dead husband.
In cold weather you find the dead roaches behind the radiators, under the electric kettle, microwave, fridge, where they group for warmth. When it’s this hot where do they go?
‘Child is well?’ Finally she’s seated, facing Thuan. The dishes are cleared and there’s a platter of fruit on the table.
‘I’m fine,’ he says.
She starts to respond, then stops. Her fingers reach out to test the lacquer of a cut lemon face, left open to the air.
‘Really,’ he says. He sounds like he means it.
‘It’s so sad what happened to Baby,’ she says. She, too, is thinking about death. ‘I didn’t even know she was sick like that.’
‘Baby? What happened?’
‘Thank you for coming to see me. I know you’re very busy.’
‘You don’t know about Baby?’ I ask despite myself.
Thuan frowns, then reaches over and squeezes our mother’s shoulder. ‘Ma. Guess what.’
‘Where you’ve been, or what you’ve been doing, is your own business,’ she continues. She says this shyly and forthrightly, a settlement of fact. ‘I don’t need you to look after me.’
‘I know, Ma.’
‘And Lan, he is very good. He can look after himself.’
‘He is very good,’ repeats Thuan, completely deadpan.
‘I hear about Lan speaking at universities, at the community centre, and it makes me very happy.’ My brother throws me an offhand smile, and in a ritual manner she follows up his smile, almost too sweetly. Turning her attention to me: ‘He has become a brave and caring man.’
I get up, go to the window. There has always been a touch of formal drama about my mother, and a situation like this – her prodigal son’s return after three long years – is bound to draw it out. Through the wind-rattled window I watch some seagulls, hovering in the air the way seagulls do. The air is runny with heat and bleaches the blue sky.
Mum’s speaking again. ‘I know I can’t tell you what to do. But I’m your mother and I don’t want my sons to be angry with each other.’
I turn around. My brother’s mouth is slightly open, sly at one corner.
‘I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here. I want my sons to look after each other.’ She speaks with care, a prepared grace. ‘Your father would want that too. Remember when you were children, you looked after each other.’
In grade three, when my parents found out I was being bullied, they left it to my brother to beat up the malefactor. Recess the next day Thuan climbed out of the concrete playground tunnel from one end, then, a long minute later, Matty Fletcher from the other, smiling with his mouth full and one hand low on his gut. My family used to bring this up at every chance. Now, Mum stops, following the thought to its logical implication. Another track cut off next to a night river. Nothing, during the trial, was so cruel as watching the jury coaxed and coerced by weeks of ‘similar fact evidence’ alleging Thuan’s propensity for violence – until it was all anyone could see of him. She must have been confounded, afterwards, by the new plot of her life – how, whether forward or back, it inescapably led her, as it did both her sons, to that one night – as though it were exactly where we were all meant to be.
‘I’ve been saving some money,’ she says.
‘Ma.’ His insouciance has settled now.
‘I need you to come to the bank with me later. To sign some papers. If you have time.’
‘Listen, Ma, I don’t need money.’
‘You’re the oldest, so I want you to look after it.’
For a moment no one speaks. In the yellow emptiness behind the window I hear voices, strains of Asian opera riding the hot red wind from a different floor, maybe a different building. The glass-warmed sun on my face. I’m brought back to mornings waking up when my pillow is so suffused with sun, the air through the open window so full of a sense of lost summer, that I clench my eyes closed again, coach those voices at the bottom of my hearing to sing louder, bear higher their meaning.
‘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 Hennessy the longer he watched them until, at the final, emptying hour – the music switched off and lights on, 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, steel roller 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 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.
