Loving, Faithful Animal (12 page)

Nothing, really. Just thinking aloud I s'pose.

Then silence, or what passed for silence in shared quarters. But Les could count on one hand, not even requiring the index nubs, the number of times he actually caught his brother asleep in that shed. Sometimes he thought so, with Jack lying still as death itself, breathing inaudibly. Then the glint of his eyes would give him away. More often he'd wake to Jack sitting upright, watchful, staring out the one grimy window or else on the other side of it, standing under the almond trees and cupping the glow of his cigarette. Keeping it hidden although there was no longer reasonable cause to. Not as if this were high school and old Mr Barnard was going to come juggernauting around the side of the shelter sheds to scruff him. But Les understood why, and he saw his brother, his half-brother, standing there under the dripping pink trees and knew he'd be cupping the glow for the rest of his life. For the rest of his long watchful nights and even the bright days strung between them. Hiding the light of his smoke from men who may well be dead by now, or were in any case thousands of miles away, across land and sea both, and more land again.

He'd heard it said—of men their father's age, of men from other wars—how so-and-so never made it back. Not to mean that so-and-so had died over there, or even that he'd left pieces of himself behind in the gangrenous pits dug by makeshift hospitals. Rather that a different man had come back in so-and-so's place, riding in his body and speaking in his voice, but staring out through the mask of his face as if with a different set of eyes.

Not so with his brother. Jack had come back home as himself but with the war in him like some dormant, cancerlike sickness, busy at some cellular level. Perhaps blooming there in the soft tissue the whole time, all the while they were tipping back schooners at the longest bar in the world, only ever giving itself away in the smallest of actions; in the clench of his jaw when the bell clanged for last drinks, in his watchfulness and his cupping the glow.

Boys came home from that war and took a test as if for drunk driving. Got a penlight shone in their eyes, got asked to locate their nose on their face—Close enough, son—and were sent on their merry way.

Les watched him out there, blowing smoke into the almond tree branches like maybe there was something up in the leaves he meant to flush out. He may've been thinking about the war, or he may've been thinking about Evelyn, the reason he'd come along. He'd said he wanted fast money from work he could just as soon walk away from, said that was the only kind of work he ever wanted again.

I thought girls found it sexy, the projectionist gig.

I'll tell you what's not sexy. Earning bob-fifty an hour and kipping in a sleep-out.

You won't make much more than that picking citrus.

Yeah, but I'll make it faster. And the taxman won't get a greedy bite of it.

He didn't talk much of Ev that season, or of the plans he had rattling about in his head, but every few nights he'd try calling her from town. Leaning at the payphone outside the pub, toeing the mica-flecked footpath like a kid. Scratching her name into the booth with a shard of bottleglass while he waited to see who picked up in that big old house on the central coast. If it was Mr or Mrs Morgan he'd hang up right away. But that early on he couldn't tell between Ev's voice and her sister's, on the phone at least, so sometimes he'd get in a
Hullo, stranger,
before Stell brought the receiver down on him in the way she'd been instructed. He'd come moping back inside then, for another tall glass of
fuck-it-all
, staring down into his beer like it was a hole to the centre of the earth. It was only a couple of times that he got the right girl on the line, and on one of these rare occasions the two of them nutted out a code. He'd give three rings then hang up, and she'd know it was him, and that he was thinking of her, and that would be enough.

Les had wondered then, What if someone picks up before three?

I told you. It's a big frigging house.

What was it about her? Les remembered the last girl, Jody, how he'd had to listen to all Jack's elated raving. Knew even the useless bits: how she stomped on her lacy things in the shower, called everyone she didn't like Francis, and was shadowed relentlessly by a red spaniel, once her grandmother's, who would only obey commands levelled at it in Welsh.

But Evelyn was a blank card. Hardly any point asking outright, though, curious as he might be. Jack just pushed his hand through his sweat-stiff hair, long grown out of its army crewcut. Said, She doesn't want too much from me. Les thought maybe he knew what that meant, though years later he'd gone over and caught them in the midst of a row, Ev backed up tight against the bathroom door, Jack's fist knuckling her chin as he frothed over with the filthiest words he could think to call her by. Her eyes were closed, and although her lips were motionless, it still looked to him something like prayer, the way she was. Something almost serene about it, unearthly, as Jack pulled his fist back and pounded the door beside her head—
What do you people want from me? What do you people want from me?
—and the plywood splintered at the third blow. Les could've walked in on a dozen worse scenes, he knew (there was evidence enough of those, in the house, in Ev's face) but this was the one he'd stumbled into. Neither one of them had noticed him there, one hand still stupidly clutching the bunch of beetroot he'd pulled up from his garden to make a present of, to trade for company. Then Ev opened her eyes and saw him there, and Jack turned, and Les didn't know the strength in himself. He got his arms around his brother and the smell of the man was fearful. Not a work sweat or even a brawling sweat but an acrid, cat-piss panic, ammoniacal, as though he truly believed he might die there, in that dim hallway, where there was not a thing wished him harm. They fell together onto the mottled carpet, Jack twisting like a possessed thing inside the poisonous slick of his skin, as Ev stepped to the other side of the smashed bathroom door and locked it behind herself. He let go of his brother then, holding his palms out even as he staggered to standing, but Jack, quicker to his feet, only looked at him and spat, disgusted, onto his own floor.

Get your own fucken family. Then he'd left, taking nothing, and Les knew better than to follow.

Ev? He spoke with his mouth close to the splintered plywood. You okay?

No sound came from the other side. No answer, no sobbing. Then the running of the shower. She came out ten minutes later wrapped up in a towel, and looked surprised to see him still leaning there, the beets propped patiently by the skirting board. She brought a hand up to where the towel tucked in between her breasts, and kept it there. All her makeup had been rinsed away, and she looked at once old and childlike, her hair damp and pasted to her skull, smelling of kids' fruity shampoo.

Go home, Les, she told him, and moved past him down the hallway, into the dusky gloom of the bedroom.

Certain moments would lose substance in their revisiting, memories he'd meant to preserve instead rubbed back to the oily sheen of over-handled suede. Les sometimes struggles to hold true, for instance, the lightning-struck tree flaring up like a torch, spectacular, burning alone on a dark hill outside Bendigo. Or the baby shark he and Jack had caught for a pet, shepherding it towards a rockpool where it would be stranded when the tide pulled back, so that they could simply come back later in the afternoon and shoo it into a bucket (Mim had said no way, obviously, when they marched it proudly up the beach).

Or how, not long before she tried to drive them into it, his mother had called him to the bank of the river (when he remembers it, it's the Tarwin, though he cannot say for certain) and pointed to the water, to glinting flecks amidst the silt, and they had worked for some minutes to scoop them up in their hands, the flecks always evading them, swimming between their fingers until finally she realised—or was it himself who saw it?—that they were grabbing after the reflections of stars.

That, too, is murked and shifting, deteriorated like overplayed video.

But this is something else, this blue in the hallway. This has held clear and sharp, unwavering, years after the fact. And he believes it's owed to this: how when Jack's fist slammed again and again into the hollow door, and then through it, an inch from Evelyn's face, she had not flinched. As in a side-alley show, some knife-throwing act, she had not flinched. And in a way Les understands this to be worse than all the violences he did not witness, than things he only ever saw in aftermath.

*

If he's honest with himself, Les is afraid of the trunk, of what he might find in it. Though his curiosity nearly won out, months ago, when Jack first brought it around. (He'd seen it coming then, had been planning this disappearing act at least that long. Since August? September?)

The girls are getting arsey, he'd explained, looking everywhere but Les. They're into everything, the both of them. I had it stashed up in the roof of the garage but nowhere's good enough now. And these dropkick mates Lani brings around …

No worries, plenty of room here.

And you won't, y'know. You won't either …?

What do I want with your fucking Viet love letters? So that both men could laugh. Not real or easy laughter but close enough, and together they shifted the bastard thing from out of Jack's Ford and around the side of the house. Jack had already known him for a yes, then, arriving with it on the Ford's backseat. Les himself already sensing that an ask was coming, that this was about
something
when he saw Jack pull into the drive, or else why wouldn't he have just walked over as usual?

You got this thing up and down from the roof on your own?

Don't ask. Think I earned myself a hernia.

Les looked at the jerry green footlocker, remembered it hunkering in the hallway at Dad and Mim's. Dinged-up and paint-spattered, the strap snapped away,
Puckapunyal
stencilled in white, hurried work.

Want this inside or out?

Damned if I care.

Les didn't ask: Why not just get rid of it then? Instead pointed with his chin through the back door and into the spare bedroom, where there was nothing but an empty aquarium, and several decades of
National Geographic
.

Would anyone know it to look at?

Might, Jack said, and so they threw a sheet over it, piling on a few stacks of
National Geo
for good measure.

There you go—loveseat!

How long since you looked in it?

Dunno. Years.

You even know what's in there?

Yep.

Everything?

Just about.

Like what?

A wigwam for a goose's bridle.

You mean it's none of my friggen business …

None of your friggen business.

Les figured it sure as hell looked to be his business, from where he was standing, but left it at that. The padlock would've been simple enough to get around, just a pin tumbler, but it would be easier still to take the lid off its hinges. Which he nearly did, some hours later, hovering about it with a Phillips head, feeling like a bee or a hummingbird, before thinking better of it.

Now that there's permission, he's even less keen. Since Jack's phone call, he's been steering clear of the spare room, whether he needs something from it or no. Has felt the trunk throbbing in there, and never more loudly than while Jack's wife sat at his table, turning the sugar bowl around in her hands, having already asked what she'd come there to ask but not knowing how to best get away.

Finally in the room with it, he realises he's still listening for something, realises how absurd that is. He leans his weight on the cutters and the lock jumps apart. Les steels himself for horror. Gruesome trophies, souvenirs. Leathered, unidentifiable flesh threaded onto bootlaces. Teeth and hair. He'd heard tell—well, Jack had told him—of how they'd smuggled back all kinds of bizarre mementos: creatures, both living and taxidermied; all manner of crude weaponry; virility potions of exotic plant matter and ground-up crawlies. And keepsakes of their own dreadful devising.

But inside the trunk there are no such atrocities, or at least nothing that speaks of them in any language he can understand. Opening the lid he's met with a mildewous fug; the must of jungle or roofspace, he can't say which. On top, a chemist's envelope of photographs: twenty-four prints that show, over and over, the same six-by-four-inch rectangle of milky blackness. A film that hadn't been threaded properly in the first place, Les guesses. Had stayed curled up snug while the shutter snapped on god-knows-what. Beneath the photographs there's other paper paraphernalia. A few pamphlets. Manuals.
Soldier's Handbook for Defense against Chemical and Biological Operations and Nuclear Warfare
. An Agent Orange info card. A sketch on the back of an onionskin leaflet. This was Jack, he saw, messing around with a rifle, either dismantling it or putting it back together. A few letters from home. One from himself:

I reckon Dad and Mim have already told you about the NT trip. Practically prehistoric, this place, crawling with dragons. Goannas, I mean. Have you ever seen those pricks up close? Last night we watched one go after a chicken, and it was carnage.

He remembers that time, but not writing about it. Remembers who he'd been including in that
we
but had otherwise seen fit to leave unmentioned; that tall Darwin girl, Elena, her sweat like dry wild sage, like dust rising from a narrow track above the sea. Commando under her damp Levis when he finally shucked her out of them. He had known, he'd thought, what he was doing, kneeling on her crumpled jeans, the high ridges of her hipbones cupped under his palms. But she'd laughed up there, above him, amused but not unkind. Said, I'm not a mango, sweetheart, and he'd tried to rein himself in a bit.