think it’s because I’m ashamed of her,” Brian said moodily on the verandah at the Regatta. “But you’re wrong. It’s not that.”
I sipped my beer and stared across Coronation Drive at the river. Two small pleasure craft, motorboats with bright anodised hulls, were whizzing upstream, and a great ugly industrial barge from Darra Cement was gliding down, shuddering a bit, moving its hips in a slow, slatternly wallow. The sight of it filled me with happiness. Good on you, you game old duck, I thought fondly, and raised my glass to it. “Probably the same rusty tub we used to see when we were riding the buses out to uni,” I said.
“Probably,” Brian said lugubriously, slumped over his beer. “Everything’s stuck in a bloody time warp, it’s like a swamp” — he waved his arms about to take in the verandah, the Regatta, the river, the whole city — “it’s like a swamp that sucks everything under, swallows it, stifles it, and gives back noxious …” His energy petered out and he slumped again. “There was this funny little man in the front row who used to sit in on lectures when I was in first year. Flat-earth freak, or something, he used to buttonhole people in the cloisters. We all used to duck when we saw him coming. Must be ninety now, if he’s a day, and there he was in the very same seat. It gave me the shivers.”
I squinted, and lined up the top of my glass with the white stripe on the broad backside of Darra Cement. “I saw in the paper that home-owners in Fig Tree Pocket and Jindalee and those newer suburbs are trying to get the dredging stopped. One of these days we’ll come back and the river won’t be brown anymore, it’ll be crystal clear. I suppose that’ll be a good thing, but it’s funny how I get pissed off when anyone tampers with Brisbane behind my back. God, I love being back, don’t you?”
“I hate it,” Brian said. He’d thrown his jacket across a spare chair. Now he undid a couple of buttons on his shirt and rolled up his sleeves. “Look,” he said with disgust, raising his arms one by one, inspecting the moons of stain at the armpits. “A bloody steam bath.”
“That’s what I love. This languid feeling of life underwater.”
Between us and the river, the traffic rushed by in beetling lines but the noise was muffled, a droning damped-down buzz. Everything was fluid at the edges. Cars seemed to float slightly above the road and to move the way they do in old silent movies. Even the surface of Coronation Drive was unfixed, a band of shimmer. A drunk man was shambling along the bike path giving off mirages; I could see three of him. I could see the gigantic bamboo canes at the water’s edge doubling, tripling, tippling themselves into the haze. I could see wavy curtains of air flapping lazily, easily, settling on us with sleep in their folds. “The only reason I don’t come back to stay,” I said drowsily, “is that if I did, I would never do another blessed thing for the rest of my life. I’d turn into a blissed-out vegetable.”
“It makes me panic, being back,” Brian said. “I feel as though I’m suffocating, drowning. I can’t breathe. I can’t get away fast enough. I get terrified I’ll never get out again.”
“Go back to Bleak City then,” I said. “Stop whingeing. You sound like a prissy Melburnian.”
“I am a Melburnian.”
“Bullshit. You’ll be buried here.”
“Over my dead body. I can never quite believe I got out,” he said. “I’ve forgotten the trick. How did I manage it?”
I shrugged, giving up on him, and let my eyes swim in Coronation Drive with the cars. An amazing old dorsal-finned shark of a Thunderbird, early sixties vintage, hove into view and I followed it with wonder. “Who was that friend of your brother’s? The one with the Alfa Romeo. Remember that time we came burning out here and the cops —”
“You’ve got a mind like the bottom of a birdcage, Philippa,” Brian said irritably. “All over the shop.”
“Polyphasic,” I offered primly. “Highly valued by some people in your field. I read an essay on it by Stephen Jay Gould. Or maybe it was Lewis Thomas. Multi-track minds, all tracks playing simultaneously. Whatever happened to him, I wonder?”
“To Stephen Jay Gould or Lewis Thomas?”
“Neither, dummy. To that friend of your brother’s. How’s your brother, by the way?”
“He’s fine.”
“Still in Adelaide?”
“Mm.”
“Did he stay married?”
“Knock it off, Philippa.”
‘You stay in touch with her?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry, Brian. I’m really sorry about all that. Are you, you know, okay?”
“Yeah, well.” Brian shrugged. “It’s easier this way. No high drama, no interruptions. I practically live at the lab.”
“I read a glowing article about you in Scientific American. It was an old one, I picked it up in the waiting room at my dentist’s.”
Brian laughed. “There’s achievement for you.”
We lapsed into silence and drank another round of beer and stared at the river.
“Your mother said she ran into Richard’s mum.”
“Don’t get started, Philippa,” Brian warned.
“I miss them, I miss them. I miss our old gang. Don’t you?”
“No.”
“Liar.”
“I never miss anyone,” he said vehemently.
“Your mother said —”
“Okay, get it over with.”
“Get what over with?”
“The lecture on how I treat Dorrie.”
“I wasn’t going to say a word,” I protested. “But since you mention it, I don’t understand why you feel embarrassed. You were actually blushing, for God’s sake. As though anyone minds.”
“You think I’m ashamed of her.”
“Well?”
“It’s not that. I’m not. I’m protecting her. I can’t bear it when other kids smirk at her. At them. I can’t bear it.”
“Other kids?”
“There’s a lot you don’t know, Philippa.”
“I don’t know why you think they were any different from anyone else’s parents.”
He signalled for another jug, and we waited until it came, and then Brian filled both our glasses.
“They were,” he said. “That’s all.”
“They weren’t. I spent
