Where There's Smoke (2 page)

At his table in the cubby, next to his papers, he sometimes extended the antenna to listen for incoming calls. One time he handled the phone too roughly and it squeaked. He flinched, peering around to see if we'd heard.

After that it stayed in the case.

Everyone reckoned that Cox was about twenty-three years old. He actually carried a birth certificate in his pocket, like a passport, and it had his mother's name. But nobody had put his name, or date of birth.

Cox's mother was long dead.

One night I watched him through the window as he sat with a clean, proper-looking girl. She had come from a workplace, in her suit, and Cox had spruced himself up to meet her in dazzling white trousers. They sat on the ledge under the coconut tree. It was Cox's first date. All he felt he could offer the young woman was a convincing pantomime of worth. I watched, thinking it was perhaps all any of us can offer. Cox frowned and smiled and frowned, and his hands masterfully framed notions and surprises for the girl. Occasionally he stepped away to take a call on his phone. I lurked in the dark of the window hoping the thing didn't squeak.

As I began to lock up for the night, he hurried to meet me on the steps. When Cox was nervous or frightened his eyes grew round, and he clenched his teeth so that you could see them clenched.

‘Mister sir, sir …'

‘Don't worry,' I said. And passing the girl on my way to the car: ‘See you tomorrow, Doctor Cox.'

The girl didn't come around again; I suspected she would have liked to, but Cox only had the ledge under the coconut tree to entertain her. He had illuminated what might have been, and that was all he felt he could ask of life. Plus the phone would've eventually squeaked.

He went back to his paperwork at night, shuffling and sorting it in and out of his case. He used to ask if I had any official-looking correspondence I could give him for his collection. But after reading the occasional letter for Cox I noticed some were beginning to arrive addressed to him. They were letters from businesses and civic groups; statements of support for some kind of charity.

Cox had founded a charity. With his glasses and briefcase, and perhaps with his phone, he had been trawling the town garnering support for a foundation for poor children and orphans. Businesses were offering to host bins on their premises where children could leave Christmas gifts. Then at Christmas Cox would deliver all the gifts to the nation's children in care.

As this dawned on we colleagues, that Cox's battered case had begun to contain real work, a cry rang out one day from the director's office.

Cox was on television. He was on television with Miss Universe.

Trinidad and Tobago and her mainland neighbour Venezuela have more than their fair share of Miss Worlds and Miss Universes; one of the most recent at that time was Trinidadian. Here she was with him. He wore his glasses. They laughed together. Later that afternoon he passed by the office, grinning, to a hail of jeers and taunts, then went out to find prostitutes for some Chinese seamen off a rusty freighter in return for a few dollars. After that he stole some coconuts from our office tree, was discovered and took a tongue-lashing for it; then retired to his hole under the building. That was Cox's day in the sun.

When Christmas came, our office became a depot and command centre for the distribution of gifts. Things had looked up for Cox, and our nights at the office developed a routine – but, being Cox, this was soon disrupted. I opened the door to his rattling one night, and he came in to ask if he could use the phone. I let him in, and paid little attention to his phone conversation. But suddenly – and strangely for the time of night – a second phone line started to ring. I picked it up on another receiver, and it was our boss calling from home. He demanded to know how Cox came to be using the office phone.

Cox had called a radio phone-in show, and among its listeners was the boss. It spelt the end of Cox's evenings in the office. Carnival season approached, and the twin-island republic became a whirl. Carnival was a prime season for Cox and his street cronies as the island filled with newcomers, and the streets were awash with flesh and beer and rum. Occasionally his face would appear like a light bulb in this place or that – at the back of some of the most select parties, or on a carnival float, or running with packs of tourists. After that, Carnival hangover seemed to last months, and the office was slow to return to routine.

When I next saw Cox he seemed to have mange growing on his skin. And lumps had appeared on his neck. The mysterious car still delivered him food most nights, but it went uneaten more often than not.

I heard that Cox had AIDS.

He had befriended a tourist, one Carnival a few years earlier, when he was a teenager. They ended up at the tourist's hotel. I never discovered if the tourist was male or female; if the sex had been consensual or sold. When you knew Cox it was as shattering a thought as child abduction. Because David Cox wasn't of the truly wasted street crowd. He never took drugs, nor dealt them. He giggled like a little girl when we goaded him into a half a bottle of beer one night in the office.

It transpired that Cox had been diagnosed some time ago, and had since developed full-blown AIDS. One of my colleagues had doctors in his family, and Cox was treated for free.

But his lip hung lower than ever, and he started to dribble. He began to lose his height and build, and his skin lost its shine. Still he rallied from time to time. Occasionally the young Doctor Cox would emerge with his spectacles, and his crucial business dealings. But Cox knew he was sick.

He asked me one night if I thought there was anything after death.

The shadowy car that delivered his supper turned out to be from one of the finest restaurants, not far around the corner. It was run by a pair of formidable women who had let themselves be tangled in Cox's net of charm. As he slowed and grew more dazed, and as we watched the glands on his neck swell, and his body show more bones, a quiet circuit of friendship showed itself around him – the restaurant, the doctor, the bosses at the office. Without fanfare his needs were catered to by souls who were touched by him.

When Cox was suddenly taken to the accident and emergency department, my colleague Kirtlee and I donned suit jackets and strode into Port of Spain General Hospital to find him. He was on a large ward.

‘It's nothing,' he said. ‘Just a cough. Tell them I'm coming back.'

He did come back for a while – but he disappeared again, this time to a facility on a lush mountainside, with a view over all the land. I was leaving the island for a few weeks, and before I left I made the journey to find him. He was on a bed next to a prisoner in chains.

Cox spread out his hands and grinned his terrified grin, as if acknowledging a dark and colossal joke. I brought him treats, and a wallet with some pieces of official paperwork. But seeing him there, wide-eyed with his situation, I knew his spirit had flowered, his time had come and gone. I hugged him, and told him to wait for me; I would bring him something back from my travels.

But Cox couldn't wait.

He told his last visitors that I was coming back. But it was from them I heard on the phone that he was dead. They buried him at La Peyrouse cemetery; his friends came from the office, from the restaurant, and apparently an unexpected number from out of the woodwork of gingerbread houses and palms and shadows. I don't know if Miss Universe was there; but it doesn't matter.

Mist hung over Port of Spain when I got back. It was butterfly season again. The highway was strewn with needless victims; all dead, but flashing fire and colour from where they lay.

THE YARRA

NAM LE

Hours before sunrise my body's already soaked with sweat, as though in anticipation of the real heat. Melbourne's in drought. The city a plain of dust and fire. I wake amidst dreams of Saturday sports as a schoolboy, shin guards and box chafing where the sheets have twisted; noise, collision down the pitch as faraway as a deeper dream. There are Tupperware containers at half-time, frozen wedges of orange. Then a sudden switch and charge, players all around me, the rising breathing in my ears – I am sprinting, dread-filled, from here to there, and here the ball is kicked to there, and there it's booted – at the very moment I've chased it down – somewhere else. The sun is on my face and then it is dark. My brother, my blood and bones, confessor and protector, came in last night, he must be sleeping downstairs, and – as always when he comes – I find my hand on my heart and my mind wide open and wheeling.

I get up and wash my face. The water from the cold faucet is warm, it smells of dirt. Downstairs, an old habit forestalls me looking at the sleeping form on the couch, and then I look. My brother, Thuan, comes bringing no clues where he's been. As always, he lies on his back. His mouth is open, his eyelids violent with their shuddered thoughts, and even under the thin sheet I can see the heavy limbs, flat and parallel as though lying in state. He has a powerful body.

I make some coffee in a plunger – not bothering to keep the noise down – and take it outside to the back deck. Surrounded by cicada song I sit down, stare out. Something is wrong. Why else would he have come? I wonder where he's been but then why does it matter? Away is where he's been. I think of his last visit three years ago, then Baby's visit a few months later – how quiet and uncertain she was, how unlike his girlfriend from those rowdier times. Before leaving she hesitated, then asked for thirty dollars; I gave it to her and never saw her again.

Against the darkness, other faces from that shared past occur to my mind with stunning vividness. Even closer, thicker, than the dark is the heat. Another scorcher on the way. Somewhere out there a forest is burning, and a family is crouching under wet towels in a bathtub, waiting as their green lungs fill with steam and soot muck. I test the coffee's temperature. As often happens at this time of morning I find myself in a strange sleepbleared funk that's not quite sadness. It's not quite anything. Through the trees below, the river sucks in the lambency of city, creeps it back up the bank, and slowly, in this way, as I have seen and cherished it for years, the darkness reacquaints itself into new morning.

He's there now, I sense him, but I say nothing. Minutes pass. A line of second lightness rises into view beside the river: the bike trail.

‘You still got my old T-shirt,' Thuan says. Even his voice sounds humid. He comes out, barefoot and bare-chested, stepping around my punching bag without even feinting assault.

‘Sleep okay?'

‘If you mean did I drown in my own sweat.'

He's feeling talkative. ‘You came in late,' I say. ‘There's a fan.'

He pads around the deck, inspecting it. Since he was last here I've jerry-rigged a small workout area, a tarpaulin overhang. I painted the concrete underfoot in bright, now faded, colours. He lowers himself onto the flat bench. Then under his breath he says, ‘All right,' as though sceptically conceding a point. He shakes his head. ‘This bloody drought,' he says.

‘I know, I've been going down there,' I say, nodding at the river. ‘Bringing water up – for the garden and whatnot.'

‘Why?'

‘You know.' He's making me self-conscious. ‘The herbs and stuff.'

‘I mean why not just use the hose?'

I glance at him. Where has he been that there aren't water restrictions? Then I catch his meaning: who cared about the water restrictions? What could they do to you?

A shyness takes hold of me, then I say, ‘I dreamt about Saturday sports.'

To my surprise he starts laughing. He lifts up his face, already sweat-glossed, and bares his mouth widely. Yes, he's changed since I saw him last. ‘Remember when you broke that guy's leg?

And they wanted us to forfeit?'

I tell him I remember, though in my memory it was he, and not I, who had done the leg breaking. We'd played on the same team some years. For a confusing moment I'm shuttled back into my morning's dream: the brittle sky, the sun a pale yolk broken across it. Then the specific memory finds me – the specific faces – the injured kid with what seemed an expression of short-breathed delight, as if someone had just told a hugely off-colour joke; the odd, elsewhere smirk playing on our father's lips as he came onto the field to collect us, batting off the coach's earnest officialese, the rising rancour of the opposing parents.

‘The look on his face,' I scoff.

I wait for Thuan to go on with the story but apparently he's done. He's chuckling still, but the sound has no teeth in it and that makes me wary. I feel tested by him.

‘Coffee?'

He thinks about it. Then, as though shoved, he falls backwards along the bench, twisting his upper body at the last second beneath the barbell. Hurriedly I count up the weight – one-twenty kilos on a fifteen-kilo bar – not shameful, but nor is it my PB.

‘Wanna spot?' I ask, making it clear from my tone that I'm joking.

He jerks the bar off the stand and correctly, easily, completes three presses. When he's done he remains on his back, arms gone loose on either side of the narrow bench as though parodying one of the weekend kayakers on the river below. I follow his long breaths. For some time he doesn't move or speak, and in the half-dark I wonder if it's possible he's fallen back asleep. All around us the cicadas beat on, their timbre unsteady, deranged by the interminable heat of the night. I settle back too. A strong whiff of sage from the garden. Trees and bushes sliding into their outlines. Buying this place when I came into my inheritance was the smartest thing I ever did – despite its run-down state, subsiding foundations, the light-industrial mills and factories on every side. I couldn't have known then that ten years on, at thirty-three, I'd be living here alone, jobless. I couldn't have reasoned that I'd end up folding each of my days into this early-morning mood, trained on the dark river below, sensing that the mood, though ineffable, was one less of sorrow than of loss – and that what I called my life would be answerable to it. I know this: my brother, when he comes, muddies this mood in me. For this I am glad, as for the fact that we are bound to each other in all the ways that matter.

As though invoked, he speaks up. ‘I'll be out of your hair in a couple of days,' he says. Then he gets up and goes into the dark bushes, presumably to take a piss.

*

Physical excellence has always been important between us. As a boy, I remember pushing myself in sports because my brother did – following him blindly into school and street games of every type. Unlike me, he didn't read, or even listen to music; for him the pursuit of physical betterment was its own reason and reward. I remember witnessing – when I was eleven and he thirteen – a push-up contest between my brother and the four Ngo boys. Later, of course, the four of them would be mediatarred as members of that night's notorious ‘Asian gang' but in truth they were no gang – they were barely even friends – and famously never on speaking terms. What they were, were brothers. And even back then, in the kids' room at some family friends' party in St Albans, squatting around the prone figure of my brother who was younger than all but one of them, they'd already learned to stick together. The contest carried on. With no clear winner emerging, they progressed to push-ups on their knuckles, then push-ups on five fingertips, then one-armed push-ups incorporating these variants – the Ngos dropping out until only Hai, the eldest, remained alongside my brother. Then Hai collapsed. All of us watched in incredulity as Thuan went on to demonstrate a one-armed push-up, left hand tightly clutching his right wrist, where his body's weight was borne entirely by the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. I was stricken – as much by my brother's single-mindedness as his strength, the fact he must have practised, in secret, for months. (I say this with confidence because it was only after three months, when I'd buffed two coin-sized spots into the bathroom floorboard, that I managed it myself.)

My brother believed that nothing could make you ridiculous if you were strong. His way was to go at things directly; entering a new school, for example, he would do what movie lore says to do upon entering jail: pick a fight – and win. I wondered what he did in jail. Our father, in his own way, failed to beat this into us, and so my brother beat it into me. I thought then I hated him for it but I was wrong. I wanted to know him – I always have. Now I realise it was only when he asserted himself in physical motion – then, ineluctably, in violence – that I came closest to doing so.

I am on the street of my childhood. I am running late, without any time to scavenge through the disused paddock, veer in and out from under lawn sprinklers – even to catch a breather at the bottom of our steep hill. He's by himself, waiting for me. Both our parents at work. I'm late, and when I come in the front door he'll punish me – those are his rules, and they're clear enough. I come in and there he is, right in front of me, his face almost unbearably inscrutable. He allows me time to put down my schoolbag and deadlock the door. I fumble off my shoes. The hot cord bunches up from my gut into my throat, clogging my breathing. I lift my arms to my face and he slubs me with a big backhander.

‘Where've you been? You're late.'

I nod, lick my cracked lips, crabwalk quickly into the living room. He follows me to the couch where I hunch my back and bury my face in the dark red cushion. Over and over he hits me, his knuckles pounding the hard part of my head where I won't bruise. The cushion smells of old blood, and spit, and sweat from both our bodies. If I reach behind to feel for the arm, the punishing fist – try to glove it with my own smaller, sweaty palms – he'll twist and sprain my fingers. If I turn to plead, I'll meet his face absent of heavy intent, as if his attention is somewhere else, as if he's bashing my skull to reach something just beyond it. He's utterly without pity and in my stronger moments I envy that. I'm sorry, I tell him. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. He drives his knee into my lower back. At the height of panic and pain something comes free in me. Afterwards, I wipe my face on the cushion and try not to track blood, if there is blood, all over the carpet. I search my reflection in the bathroom mirror. If there's visible damage, he'll barter with me, he'll let me off next time, he'll do my chores, buy me jam doughnuts at the tuckshop – so long as I don't dob him in. But only rarely are there visible signs.

‘What happened?' Mum asks. She's had a long day and her face is closed and loose.

‘Nothing.'

She pauses. ‘I'll tell your dad.'

I look at her scornfully. Even she knows that doesn't deserve an answer.

One of the common tacks in media accounts of my brother, I noticed – beyond the routine designation of ‘monster' – was to call attention to his inscrutability. None of the other culprits merited such consideration. The Ngo boys, for instance, always looked thuggishly guilty. But courtroom reporters and sketch artists described, artfully and self-consciously, their failure of scrutiny in the face of Thuan Xuan Nguyen; a face typically depicted as ‘smooth', or ‘mask-like', on someone whose very name rebuffed pronunciation in each of its three syllables. I could understand their frustration. My brother was a person in whom deep faults ran, yet always he seemed to conduct them into something like charisma. All my life I never judged him; to me he represented the fulfilment of my own genomic seed and tatter. I never suspected, after all that happened, at the trial and beyond, that complete strangers might also be capable of my reservation. This is not to defend what he did. This is to say I understood, completely, the media's macabre, manic insistence on the details of that night. The facts of the matter. The altercation and eviction from the nightclub. The first victim chased down and hacked to death by a gang wielding machetes, meat cleavers and samurai swords. The sickening count of wounds on his body. Victims two and three fleeing into the Yarra, carried by the water approximately 200 metres to the west – shadowed alongshore by the gang. One with gashes on his wrists and forearms, three fingers missing below the knuckle, from a presumed attempt to return to shore. Chances are you may recall these details. The sober-faced, riverside TV reports, the strongly worded declarations by members of the mayor's office, the Homicide Squad, the Asian Squad – while in the wintry background, day on day, the grieving families held vigil, wailing in Vietnamese as they proffered incense sticks, lit and let go of tissue paper. You may have even heard me speak, in one of my presentations, about this incident. Most people recognise my brother only through one of his tabloid nicknames: the Meat Cleaver Murderer. He was there on the bank that night. Here's what most people won't know – what I've never spoken about: I was there with him.

*

When it gets light my brother showers and heads out. I laze on the couch in the living room, windows open but curtains drawn, shirtless in front of the rickety fan, rolling a chilled glass bottle of water back and forth across my chest. Otherwise, I try not to move. When the phone rings, it's Mum – one of her friends has just spotted Thuan on Victoria Street. Is it true? Has he come back?

I'm waiting for him when he returns. We have to go visit Mum, I tell him. He stops, then nods, puts his sunnies back on. Outside, the air is so hot it immediately dries out my lungs; I can feel the bitumen boiling through my sandals. This is a killing sun. We walk south, through the Abbotsford chop shops and factories, the streets made slow, strange with heat vapour, the sudden assaultive glare of metal surfaces. People move, then pause in scant shadows. On the main street the tramlines look as though they're liquefying. Too hot to think, let alone speak, we make our way towards the high-rise flats.