Free Brothers and Sisters by Charlotte Wood

there was a sunken quality to his face, particularly around his eye sockets, despite the brightness in his gaze.
    Still breathing hard from his karate moves, Martin lit up another cigarette and turned to Phytos. ‘You should show Mike your videos.’
    Phytos raised his eyebrows. ‘I think he’s a bit young for that sort of thing, aren’t you, Michael?’
    ‘I’m not too young at all,’ I said quickly.
    ‘Come on,’ Martin urged. ‘He can look away if he doesn’t like it.’
    ‘What would your mother think?’ Phytos stared at me with a gaze as smooth and polished as wood, his mouth hooked at one end as if we were sharing a private joke.
    I told him that I didn’t care what my mother thought. She was far away, and I was a man now.
    ‘Just remember that a man doesn’t have to tell his mother everything,’ he said as he put on the video.
    I sat on the couch beside Martin. The movie was foreign. I guessed that they were speaking German. We watched a woman in a nurse’s uniform put her hand inside another woman’s vagina.
    ‘Look at that.’ Martin leaned into his crossed arms and tensed his fists so that veins rose into the pale skin. ‘Yeah, give it to her.’
    ‘Don’t get ash on my couch,’ Phytos said, touching his head.
    He put an ashtray beside Martin and kept on tidying the house, making sure that it was as clean and carefully ordered as the moment I had walked in. All of the walls were white. There were no pictures. The neatness of the place was disrupted only by a plant that had outgrown its pot. Its tendrils, thick as femoral arteries, shot along the window frame and up to the ceiling, and its fleshy leaves dangled along the architraves.
    ‘You have the best dad,’ Martin said suddenly.
    I watched him briefly, swallowing and drawing at the cigarette between his wet lips, exhaling smoke through his nose the way my father did, then my eyes pulled back towards the television. I had a hard-on. I was grinning and the muscles of my cheeks strained at my jaw. My heart shuddered against the bottom of my throat. Most of all, I felt a shameful relief that my brother couldn’t see me.

    You’re too young. This was something my brother said often when we were growing up. He said it once when we were standing beside a place shut off from the world by a tall barbed wire fence. Signs that said Keep Out and Danger hung along the fence, but my brother had found a slit cut into the wire and he held it open as he stared back at me. I told him what I always did, that I wasn’t too young at all, and he let me follow him.
    I didn’t ask my brother what we were doing. I never did. We passed a shooting range, and long chains that looked like they were used to restrain dogs. Paths ran between oaks and pines and past concrete structures with locked metal doors. We came to a place where a huge old tree spread its branches beside a narrow road.
    Nearby stood a building punctured by lights and I could see people moving around inside. I wanted to stay out of sight. A sea of tiny nuts lay around the tree facing us. My brother strolled forward, squatted in plain view and began eating them. He turned and looked at where I cowered in the bushes with a broad smile.
    ‘They taste good, Mike,’ he said.
    I forgot everything and walked over to him. A man in an army uniform came riding past on a bike. When he saw us, he stumbled off his bike and ran towards us with a tight, focused expression. It was the kind of look that I’d seen on my stepfather’s face a hundred times. My brother was off. He yelled at me to run too. The man was surprisingly fast. When I felt his breath right behind me, I turned and tried to warn him off in a shrill tone. He seized me by the back of my shirt and carried me towards the building.
    By the time my brother got home, it was dark outside and I sat at the dinner table with my mother and stepfather.
    My stepfather shoved back his chair and looked him up and down. ‘Where have you been? What have