by Liam Pieper
I used to throw parties every Friday night after school. My parents were from the harm-minimisation school of parenting. They figured, If the kids are going to do drugs and drink alcohol, they should do it at home, where we know they are safe. It’s a good theory, but in practice it meant I had a polite beer and a spliff with them at the start of the night before sneaking off to my bedroom to rail crushed pills and try to convince Lilly to let my hand up her skirt. Around the time Hamish was starting high school, our house was more often than not filled with drunk and high teenagers dry-humping each other.
By the time Hamish was old enough to throw his own parties, my parents had rebuilt themselves enough to discipline him, but a precedent had been set and they were big on egalitarianism. As kids, whenever one of us had a birthday, the other siblings were given a ‘jealousy present’, some kind of tchotchke to stop us from fighting with each other. So if Hamish wanted to get drunk or high like I had, who were Mum and Dad to argue?
On his birthday, or even just when Mum and Dad were out of town for the weekend, I would buy Hamish booze or help him score drugs, then supervise in a half-arsed way that largely involved playing records and flirting with his friends. If there was trouble I would sort it out, and I usually invited a couple of my more thuggish friends around in case things got nasty.
It only got really rough once and that was my fault entirely. I was supervising one of Hamish’s parties while my parents were away at some crystal-healing retreat, when a hoard of FUBU-clad teens gatecrashed. In a panic I called the Ryans to tell them I had a problem. Ten minutes later, two Commodores came screeching into our street and a dozen martial artists got out and started beating the shit out of the teenagers. It was kind of beautiful to watch, if terrible, like a David Attenborough documentary in which seagulls pick off baby turtles as they amble towards the ocean. A handful of wiry fighters grabbed the wiggers by the scruffs of their necks and marched them out of the party. There wasn’t much fightback, except for two lads who pulled out trolley poles. They dropped them, though, when one of the Ryans unsheathed his katana. In retrospect, I’d overreacted.
‘Look, Liam,’ one of the Ryans explained to me diplomatically. ‘We’re happy to come down and help you when you’re in trouble, but you’re only really supposed to call us in emergencies.’
My fraternal instincts were patchy at best. Everything I did to make life better for my little brother just laid the groundwork for something much worse further down the line.
By 2006 I had, if not sobered up, then got a handle on my drinking and drug intake, wrangled a BA out of university, found work in kitchens, fallen in love, moved in with my girlfriend, and saved up enough cash to go overseas for the first time. Katya and I pooled our money, bought round-the-world tickets and packed up our apartment, ready to spend a year circumnavigating the globe. There was a gap of a couple of weeks between when we ended our lease and our jetting off. By coincidence, my folks were away on holiday, so we moved into the family home – just me, Katya and Hamish.
It wasn’t a smooth fortnight. Hamish’s friends were always around the house, smoking cones and railing lines, and while many of them were charming young men and women with interesting theories on The Matrix, the rest were fucking cunts. I kicked out one pituitary case for stealing the change from Katya’s wallet after she’d left it on the coffee table, and I was forever talking some poor young lady who’d taken too much acid down from the roof – figuratively, most of the time.
The day before we were due to fly out, our friends threw us a going-away party in town. I’d recently done a review for a magazine that couldn’t pay me but offered to settle the account with beer. I found myself in possession of a station wagon full of slabs, too much to drink in one night, so I took as much as I could carry in a taxi to the party and gave the rest to Hamish as a peace offering for putting up with me for the past few weeks.
Our flight was at 10 a.m., and our party went all night. As gloom lifted over the city skyline that morning, Katya and I kissed our friends goodbye, climbed in a taxi and headed for the suburbs to pick up our luggage before flying to Argentina. As the cab pulled up near our house, I saw the all-too-familiar wash of blue and red lights over our street. A half-dozen or so emergency vehicles were parked out the front of the family home.
‘Fuck,’ Katya said. ‘What has that pisda done now?’
A police sergeant came towards me as I was climbing out of the cab.
‘Are you Liam Pieper?’
‘What seems to be the problem, officer?’ I felt the catechism spill out of my mouth – something I’ve never been able to refrain from saying to cops. It’s one of those verbal tics, like when a waiter tells me to enjoy my sandwich and I cheerfully scream at him, ‘YOU TOO!’
‘The problem is that your little brother and his friends have stolen your car.’
Do you know the feeling of drawing a losing hand on a huge bet in poker, and your heart fills with fury and despair, all while you try to smile winningly? That.
‘I don’t think so, officer. They wouldn’t do a thing like that.’ The cop grinned, then pointed up the street. I craned my head to peer around the corner block where he was pointing, to see my car twisted around the remains of a brick fence three doors up. I could see it quite clearly in the flashing lights, the front wheels well over the ruins of the low wall, with the chassis balancing precariously on a mess of crumbled brick and the twisted guts of my station wagon. I stared at it agape for a minute while the situation clawed its way into my foggy brain. The cop was waiting on me, smug but cross and tired. Next to me, I felt Katya start to vibrate with Slavic fury.
‘That little shit!’ she hissed. ‘Where is he?’
‘That’s a good question,’ the cop said. ‘He’s done a runner.’
My mind kicked into gear, the way my poor car never would again. ‘Officer, I don’t believe my little brother would do this. What evidence do you have?’ Somewhere along the line I’d developed the habit of speaking in overly formal, almost Edwardian English when talking to police. The cop sighed and started his inventory, counting off on his fingers as he went.
‘We have a positive ID from a neighbour who saw the vehicle leave the garage and drive through the fence. The same neighbour, in fact most of the neighbourhood, has identified your brother as running from the vehicle. Your keys are still in the ignition, and your brother has left his wallet in the vehicle. A few minutes after the incident, he called 000 to report the car as having been stolen while he was asleep. We’re pretty sure he’s inside the house, but nobody is answering the door.’
It did seem persuasive when you put all the facts in a line like that, but I said, ‘I’m not convinced, but if this has happened like you say, what are you going to charge him with?’
‘That depends on him. If he turns himself in, we’ll charge him with driving without a licence and probably driving under the influence. Otherwise, we’ll catch him and charge him with a whole lot more, starting with insurance fraud.’ The cop turned to leave. It was late in his shift and he obviously wanted to go home. I could see in his eyes that mentally he was already tucked up on the couch in his trackies, catching up on TV. ‘If you see him, I’d do my best to get him to turn himself in. Otherwise you’ll all be hurting.’
My parents had a thing for native plants. The house was ringed by a thicket of native ferns and low-lying shrubbery that was popular with giant spiders. At night all throughout my childhood I could hear the spiny branches of the ferns scraping against the windows whenever the breeze picked up. Functionally, the thicket made it difficult to get near the windows of the house, so unless someone actually opened the door, it was next to impossible to determine whether anyone was home. This had its benefits, like when Jehovah’s Witnesses or door-to-door salesmen – or the police, for that matter – dropped around.
I unlocked the back door and stepped into the lounge room. It was dark and the air was thick with cigarette and bong smoke. On each of the two couches was
a teenager wrapped up in a sleeping bag. It felt like that moment at a slumber party when somebody’s angry dad walks in and you all lie dead silent and pretend to be asleep.
I rolled one of the kids over. It was Tim, one of Hamish’s friends who I’d seen chasing shots with beers earlier in the night. He made a show of waking up groggily.
‘Liam?’ He blinked and smacked his lips like a cartoon character. ‘Hey! What’s happening? Did something happen?’ He would have been more convincing if he didn’t have the big teddy-bear eyes and grinding jaw of someone who’d been up on drugs for a very long time.
Katya leaned over and smacked him across the face. ‘Don’t fuck around, you little cunt!’ she snarled. ‘Where is Hamish?’
All the air went out of the kid. ‘I don’t know,’ he said miserably. ‘He took off running when the cops arrived. We didn’t mean to crash your car. We just wanted to get some cigarettes.’
‘Where did he go?’
‘I don’t know. He just ran out the back door.’ The poor guy was close to tears. ‘He hit his head when we stacked the car. He was bleeding.’
Katya and I were due at the airport in less than an hour, each of us with a non-refundable $8000 round-the-world ticket. We called the airline to ask if we could defer the flight and they flat-out told us no. They explained that the flight could not be pushed back, that it was company policy for the ticket to be forfeited if an international flight was missed. Given that we couldn’t afford another ticket, we had to get on that flight, or we didn’t leave at all. My fantasies about strolling through the cobblestoned streets of Buenos Aires, stopping to shoot the breeze with tango dancers in Spanish, or make love to tango dancers, also in Spanish, evaporated. I thought of the pastries I wouldn’t buy from cute corner shops and the tasteful but inexpensive antique Spanish silver I wouldn’t buy from street vendors to take home for all my loved ones to admire.
Dazed, I let go of Tim’s neck, and he rolled himself back into a ball and pretended to be asleep again. I wandered to the front of the house, checking the bedrooms to see if Hamish was in any of them. I opened the front door and slumped on the porch to smoke a cigarette as gravity set in.
I flashed back to Ardian laid out cold on the slab, his blood black against blue skin, and suddenly it was Hamish. In the minute I spent fumbling with my cigarettes, I saw my little brother die a dozen times. He succumbed to a head injury and bled out in some flophouse. He realised too late that he needed help, trying to stand on shattered legs, bones protruding through ruptured skin. The pigs grabbed him and he died after being shivved in a holding cell. Or he ran from the cops again and they opened fire. My hands were shaking as I lit the cigarette.
Then Hamish jumped out from behind a fern.
The cigarette fell out of my mouth and lay for a second on my jacket, burning a hole into it, before I recovered enough to let out a strangled cry of relief. Then I pulled Hamish into the house and started choking him.
It had happened like this. Hamish and his friends had drunk a slab, and then another, then several more. At a certain point they’d run out of cigarettes. A few of them, Hamish included, were eighteen, but none had a driver’s licence or any other kind of ID, so they couldn’t get cigarettes. Then one of them had an idea. If they drove to a 7-Eleven and the guy behind the counter could clearly see that they were ‘driving’ a ‘car’ like ‘adults’, then that would be incontestable proof that they were eighteen.
The keys to my station wagon were in my room. I’d figured I wouldn’t need them on my trip, so I’d stowed them away and cancelled the insurance before mothballing the car in the garage. The station wagon also had a sticky clutch, which I’d put off repairing until I returned in a year’s time. When they stole the car none of them had never driven before, the clutch jumped and it went straight out of the carport, across the road and through the neighbour’s fence.
Hamish had cracked his forehead on the dashboard but remained conscious. He and Tim sat dazed, looking at each other, and then leaped out of the car and back into the house. They spent a couple of much panicked minutes making a plan and then acting on it.
They would call the police to report that the car had been stolen while all the young men in the house were asleep. To add gravitas to the story, Hamish would affect a sleepy What the hell is going on here? demeanour. Ever the method actor, he got into his pyjamas and jumped into bed before Tim dialled 000.
‘Hi . . . um . . . This is Tim. I’m a friend of Hamish Pieper’s. He’s Liam Pieper’s little brother. Um . . . I think someone just stole Liam’s car. I’m just waking Hamish up.’
At this point, Hamish picked up the receiver and said sleepily into the phone, ‘Hello? This is Hamish. What’s going on? Did someone steal Liam’s car?’
Hamish was transferred to the local police station, where they said words to the effect of ‘We know you stole the car, Hamish. We’re outside.’ The cops then banged on the front door.
Hamish opened it, doing his best to smile beatifically.
‘We know you did it.’
‘That’s crazy! I didn’t do anything.’
‘We have a witness who saw you crash the car then come inside this house.’
‘Oh.’
‘Do you have a photo we can show the witness?’
‘Um . . .’
‘Or we can pull up your file. We know you have priors.’
‘Wait here. I’ll get the photo.’
Hamish closed the door, and then took off sprinting out the back. He doubled back midway around the block, sneaked under the house and hid in the fern garden while the cops did a perfunctory search of the area but kept away from the mess of plants and huntsman spiders that Hamish was hiding in. He was watching while I spoke to the cops, and once they’d left he jumped out and explained it all to me.
Now that I’d confirmed Hamish was still alive, I had to decide quickly how to kill him. I also had less than half an hour to be at the airport, if I was going to fly. Hamish was on the run from the cops, my folks weren’t back to look after him for another two weeks, and, although his head wound wasn’t severe, he was in serious danger of being eviscerated by Katya. She stalked back and forth, small and vicious, rippling with muscle, like a badger about to skin a vole.
‘What are you going to do?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled.
I lost my temper. ‘Well, figure it out in a hurry! You little shit! Do you even know what you’ve done?’ I wanted to hit him.
‘Yes.’
‘Are you going to turn yourselves in?’
He balled a fist and hit himself in the head twice. Then he lifted his chin to look at me. ‘I’m going to kill myself.’
I spoke softly, my voice dropping in the way it only does when I’m very, very angry. ‘You aren’t going to do that. Because that’s selfish and childish and now you have to be a fucking man and own this.’ I thought for a minute. ‘You are going to go and stay at Tim’s house until Mum and Dad get home. Then you are going to tell them what you’ve done and together you guys are going to hire a lawyer and sort this out.’ I drew a deep breath and let it out. Hamish was staring miserably at the ground. I felt cool now, hard and empty as a Sherrin. ‘I’m going to Argentina.’ I shook Hamish’s hand, stiff and formal and awkward – we’d never shaken hands before. ‘Fix this,’ I told him, and on my way out the door I pulled Tim aside and whispered in his ear. ‘Watch him. If he hurts himself, I’ll kill you.’
And I was gone.
On the fourteen-hour flight to Argentina, I felt like the biggest piece of shit in the world. I’d abandoned my little brother in his hour of need, and as I hurtled to the other side of the world I had no idea if he was in police custody or not. I’d suspected for some years that I was a selfish person, and now, when the crunch had come, I’d turned my back on my family right when they needed me the most.
After we landed the first thing I did was call home. It rang out and kept ringing out for two weeks while I to
re out my hair. Finally, Hamish picked up the phone.
‘Oh, yeah, I’m fine,’ he said cheerfully. ‘The cops have been around a few times but I just didn’t answer the door. They can’t touch me.’
And so they couldn’t. They interviewed him a few days after the incident, and Hamish explained that he’d put the keys in the ignition of the car in order to use the headlights to light the party, then forgotten to retrieve them. A passer-by must have seen the car and opportunistically stolen it, only to crash into the fence. He finished the story and smiled at the officer taking notes.
‘Well, it appears to us that you are the perpetrator. You have to admit, Hamish, that these are very suspicious circumstances.’
‘I didn’t do it.’
‘I’d bet my left nut that you did.’
‘Well, then you’d be out of a nut. I suggest you check with your good lady-wife before you go putting any bets down.’ The cops let him go, reluctantly.
They tried again once Mum and Dad had returned home, laying out the facts, but my parents weren’t hearing any of it. They rounded on the cops and delivered a lecture on Hamish’s innocence. ‘He would never drive a car without us there! He’s simply terrified of driving. What you’re alleging is impossible.’
Shortly afterwards Dad wrote me a long, angry email letting me know that my car had been stolen because I’d left the keys in the ignition, how stupid that was, and how disappointed he was in me, and what a bad example I was setting for Hamish. I wrote back to say I would try to be a better role model in the future, and to say hi to Hamish for me, and that I was looking forward to catching up with him for a chat when I got home. Then I went out for a walk through the cobblestoned streets of Buenos Aires, looking for somewhere to practise my Spanish and for someone who might sell me a tasteful but inexpensive pistol to bring home.
