Free Brothers and Sisters by Charlotte Wood Page A

you been up to?’
    My stepfather was a large man, overweight, his hands stained with work and tar from the pipes he smoked. He had a way of standing right over us when he asked questions, his arms and shoulders locked as he waited for answers.
    My brother glanced across at me. He had straight, dark hair and my father’s brown eyes that turned hard and flat in anger, though right now they were full of curiosity. He said that he’d lost me while we were out playing. My stepfather turned and I felt his gaze. We were eating sandwiches for dinner. I chewed on my sandwich and shrugged.
    Later, as we lay on the separate levels of our bunk bed, I told my brother how I’d been made to sit in a room with fluorescent lights, a bunch of men in uniforms around me. The men had looked at me until I started crying. They had given me a glass of orange juice and a biscuit and told me never to come back.
    ‘I waited at the fence for hours,’ my brother said.
    I thought that he’d pile abuse on me then for not having run quick enough, but he fell silent, and the silence grew long. It occurred to me suddenly that he was ashamed.
    I knew that I had done the right thing by not telling. These were the important things; never to ask for explanations, never to talk about what we did. My brother and I shared a room. In the months after I was born, my brother had tried to bury me. He would scour the room for objects that he could pile into my cot: toys, clothes, footwear.
    Later, he usually ignored me, but there were moments when he didn’t. My mother told him off once for carefully laying a packet full of drawing-pins, points upwards, in my bed. She said that it was his responsibility to look after me, that we only had each other.
    My brother’s violence often came unexpectedly. He would turn with a sudden blankness in his eyes and punch me in the arms and the stomach and chest. Sometimes I would scream so that our stepfather would come in and hit us both, but often I kept quiet and so did he. I had seen my brother fighting at school. He beat people quickly and efficiently, no matter how much bigger or stronger they were, and while they were still nursing bloody noses, he’d be off doing something else, smiling like the whole thing had never happened.
    It was the same with me. Not long after his attacks, he would come strolling back into view, preoccupied with something else, a pleasant grin on his face when he glanced in my direction. His whole expression would dazzle me, invite me to forget, and I would find it impossible to maintain my fury. But in the days that I spent alone with my father, I started to see the smile differently.

    Towards the end of my stay, I bought a record with my father’s money. He had been giving me money the whole time as if neither of us really knew what else we should be doing together. I bought Queen’s Greatest Hits and played it full blast in his tidy, strangely empty house. He listened tolerantly the whole way through and watched with a kind of curiosity bordering on affection as I played air guitar.
    Martin was there too, doing his endless repetitions of push-ups against the wall. When the last song finished, Phytos told me suddenly that he still cared about my mother, despite everything, despite what he had lost. Showing his perfect teeth, he said that she was a lovely person but just unstable, prone to imagining things that weren’t there—or, he added with a confident glance at Martin, things that had never happened.

    When I returned to Australia, it was the height of summer. My brother didn’t ask much about Phytos. He had always seemed slightly bored by our father and his only disappointment appeared to be that he’d missed out on seeing his old friends. At first I couldn’t bring myself to talk about the trip at all, but then things began to loosen inside me.
    ‘Phytos says nothing happened,’ I told my brother a few weeks after my return.
    At first I thought he hadn’t heard me. We were