Where There's Smoke by Black Inc. Page B

wordless flurry, back out to the middle of the river. At one point the river raised the legs of the brother, and he lay on his back, head bent forward, looking at the evidence of his body as though in disbelief. To this day people wonder why they didn’t swim a few more metres to the west, where they might easily have held onto a leg or abutment of the railway bridge. Or back eastward, to the Church Street bridge. Further east yet, they could have struck out for Herring Island, accessible only by water, and made sanctuary there. As it happened, they stayed in the deep middle of the Yarra. They were drunk, injured, freezing, one asthmatic and unable to swim, and after some desperate horseplay and muffled splashing their eyes went loose and their bodies calm, as though their feet had finally found a shelf in the water, and then they sank, their bodies spinning in slow dark minutes of motion, and they did not re-emerge until two days later when the police divers dragged them out.
    My brother bent down at the path’s edge. The new silence rendered the brothers’ moments-ago breathing clotted and monstrous in its memory. Thuan took off his shoes, dipped them into the slow-moving river, then took them out and wrung the blood and water out of them. He dipped them in, took them out, and wrung them again. Our shoulders touched and pushed off each other as we ran back to the car.
    *
    â€˜What else do you say?’
    â€˜I talk about revenge. Honour. Loyalty and betrayal.’
    â€˜That’s all bullshit too.’
    â€˜Not to me it isn’t.’
    â€˜Wouldn’t you rather just forget everything?’
    â€˜I wouldn’t change a thing.’
    â€˜More bullshit. This is what you want? This life?’
    â€˜I’d do it again.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜For you. Because you couldn’t. Because you wanted to.’
    â€˜I didn’t know what I wanted. It was stupid. Jesus, it’s easy for you to say.’
    â€˜No it’s not.’
    â€˜You didn’t cop the twelve years.’
    â€˜That’s why you came back?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜To rub that in my face?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Sorry.’
    â€˜Actually.’
    â€˜I would’ve done that, I would’ve copped it.’
    â€˜Actually, I came back to ask for your forgiveness.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜You heard me.’
    â€˜You don’t have to. I told you I’d do it again.’
    â€˜That’s what I mean. I’m sorry I made you that way.’
    *
    The next morning he was gone. In hot February my brother came back to me, and stayed for only two nights and one day. I haven’t seen him since. My life, such as it is, I owe to him. If guilt is for what you’ve done and shame for who you are, then how could I feel shame? I was a brother, and my brother’s brother. Forget, he tells me, but does he taste them in his tap water, the savour of their hair and skin in his herbs? They too were brothers. Melbourne’s in drought. The city a plain of dust and fire. The river hasn’t water enough to wash the foreign matter out.
    I have my work, and my garden, my mother in her glassy loneliness to attend. I have my mornings. Who knows if he’ll come back? I have my dreams, too, which have come to seem coextensive with my memories. My sleep is shallow, and my dreams never seem to go all the way down. I step out of my night window and the river wipes the field before me, a smear of silver noise, the great fishes climbing the water by the plate-glass glint of their eyes, in their indigo and orange glows, mastering the dark. I am underneath, plunging as the grey scrim of surface blackens above me. Breathe, lungs, and let me time. We live our lives atop the body of emotion of which we’re capable. I follow my dim thought-embryos, I see by my feeling, I sink with my words, for words are shadow, and shadow cannot explain light.
    Where’ve you been.
    You started a