Free Brothers and Sisters by Charlotte Wood Page B

sitting on the couch. My brother was watching the cricket. He could sit in front of the television for hours when the cricket was on, and his face would grow empty and still.
    ‘What do you mean?’ he asked at last, without looking away from the television.
    ‘Between you and him. He says Mum made it all up.’
    My brother laughed but he didn’t say anything. I mentioned seeing my friend Martin with Phytos quite a bit although I didn’t say what we’d watched together.
    ‘Yeah,’ my brother said. ‘Some of the guys on my soccer team used to hang at his house too. Even when I wasn’t around.’
    He turned and gave me a brief smile. He had a way of smiling without showing his teeth that had nothing to do with putting on charm.
    By this stage, my father had phoned up a couple of times. The next time he phoned, my brother asked to speak to him.
    ‘Phytos.’ My brother spoke softly into the phone. He listened for a moment then said, ‘I hate your fucking guts. You’re a coward. Don’t call here again.’
    He put down the phone and went into his room. He came out with his spearfishing gear.
    ‘It’s blowing a westerly,’ he said. ‘Bet you the water’s dead flat.’
    I had been watching him jump off rocks into the sea for years. I would stand on the shore and glimpse him way out and alone in the turbulence of the sea and my stomach would churn. Dolphins dipped and cut through the water much closer to the shore than he was.
    The first time he took me out spearfishing was during that summer. We plunged off the rocks and started paddling; out, it seemed, towards the tankers on the horizon. We paddled for twenty minutes, way past the shark nets. I couldn’t see the bottom; only islands of shadow and strange turns of light, and fish, longer than my arms, that slid past as if I didn’t exist.
    Every now and again, my brother kicked down into the gloom and left me drifting above him in a cloud of bubbles. Alone, at the surface, I shivered and choked at each watery breath in my snorkel until I saw him rising towards me. Often, the carcass of a fish hung from his spear. He nearly always managed to shoot fish in the eye. When he was nearby, I would lift my head and stare back at the thin ribbon of the shoreline and yearn for it, but the thought of paddling back alone filled me with terror.
    By the time we returned to shore, I couldn’t feel my hands or feet and my teeth chattered so fiercely that I thought they would shatter. I asked him whether he ever got scared out there by himself.
    ‘No,’ he told me.
    ‘What do you think of when you’re out there?’
    He showed his teeth. ‘Nothing. Just the fish.’
    My brother was by this time sixteen years old, well proportioned, and broad-shouldered. My own limbs were longer and felt strange to me. His short, dark hair was tousled and rough with salt water. There was often a subtle but intent scowl on his face that sat like a wall in front of whatever I imagined that he was thinking. He crouched with one knee on the rocks and opened the belly of each of his fish with a practised motion. He tossed fistfuls of guts to the seagulls that wheeled and descended around us.
    Staring back over the blue drape of the ocean, he remarked that he was impressed how I had stayed out with him for nearly two hours. He had come prepared, in a thick rubber wetsuit, while I wore only my swimmers. I had never heard him say that to me before, that he was impressed with me. I didn’t tell him the truth.
    I have this dream sometimes, that I am small and standing at a door. The door is orange and it has a window above it. Through this window, which is slanted open, I can hear my brother and my father. I am outside the door. They are playing a game on the other side. I am calling out, trying to get their attention, but the door remains closed.
    My brother often sold me his old clothes. He would dangle them in front of me and offer them at a price. There was never any negotiation. If I refused to