finger, he played in a spill of beer. We were both, I knew, thinking of Elaine.
“Sorry,” I said, “I shouldn’t have … That’s something that happens when I come back. Every so often, you know, maybe once or twice a year, I still have nightmares about Elaine. But not when I’m back here. When I’m here, we all still seem to be around. In the air or something. I can feel us.” I stared into my glass, down the long amber stretch of the past. “How long is it since you’ve been back, anyway?”
“Five years.”
“That’s your average? Once every five years?”
“It’s not that I want to come that often,” he said. “Necessity.”
I laughed. Brian did not. “You’re not usually this negative about Brisbane,” I protested. “When was the last time I saw you? Two years ago, wasn’t it? In Melbourne. No, wait. I forgot. London. June before last in London when you were there for that conference — Yes, and we got all nostalgic and tried to phone Julie, tried to track her down … that was hilarious, remember? We got onto that party line somewhere south of Mt Isa.”
“It’s different when I’m somewhere else,” Brian said. “I get depressed as hell when I’m back.”
“Boy, you can say that again.”
“Last time ever, that’s a promise to me,” he said. “Except for Dorrie’s funeral.”
“God, Brian.” I had to fortify myself with Cooper’s comfort. “You’re getting me depressed. Anyway, speaking of your mother, we’d better get going. What time’s she expecting us?”
“Oh shit.” Brian folded his arms tightly across his stomach and pleated himself over them.
“What’s the matter?”
“I can’t go.”
“What?”
“I can’t go, Philippa. I can’t go. I just can’t. Can you call her for me? Make up some excuse?”
I stared at him.
“Look,” he said. “I meant to. I thought I could manage it. But I can’t. Tell her I’m tied up. You’ll do it better than I could.”
“What the hell is the matter with you?”
“Look, tell her—” He seemed to cast about wildly for possible bribes. “Tell her we’ll take her out for lunch tomorrow, before my afternoon flight. I’m staying at the Hilton, we’ll take her there.”
“I won’t do it. I’m not going to do your dirty work for you. This is crazy, Brian. It’s cruel. You’ll break her heart.”
Brian stood abruptly, knocking over his chair and blundered inside to the pay phone near the bar. I watched him dial. “Listen, Dorrie,” I heard him say, in his warm, charming, famous-public-person voice. “Look, something’s come up, it’s a terrible nuisance.”
“You bloody fake!” I yelled. There were notes of rush and pressure in his voice, with an undertone of concern. It wasn’t Brian at all. It was someone else speaking, someone I’d never even met, someone who couldn’t hear a thing I was saying, someone who didn’t even know I was there.
“They’ve got something arranged at uni,” he said smoothly, unctuously. “I didn’t know about it, and the thing is, I can’t get out of it. I’ll tell you what though. Philippa and I will take you out to lunch tomorrow. She’ll pick you up at twelve o’clock, okay? and we’ll all have lunch at the Hilton. Look, I’ve got to rush, I’m terribly sorry. Look after yourself, Dorrie. See you tomorrow, all right? Bye now.”
“I’m going,” I said as he lurched back. “I’m taking a cab right now to your mother’s. I won’t be part of this.”
“Philippa, stay with me.”
“I won’t. It’s just plain goddamn rude and boorish when she’s got a meal prepared. At least one of us … I’m just bloody not going to—What? What is it? What the hell is it?
He looked so stricken that there was nothing to be said.
“All right,” I conceded, resigned. “Where do you want to go?”
“Come back to the Hilton with me. I don’t want to be alone. I have to get blind stinking drunk.”
In the cab I said: “How come I feel more wracked with guilt than you do?”
He laughed. “You actually think I’m not wracked with guilt?”
“Oh, I know why I am,” I said. “It’s because I’m a mother too.” If my son did this to me, I thought, I’d bleed grief. My whole life would turn into a bruise.
“There’s a lot you don’t know,” Brian said. “I can’t talk about it unless I’m blind stinking drunk.”
We didn’t go to his room. It wasn’t like that. We have never been lovers, never will be, never could be, and not because it isn’t there, that volatile aura, the fizz and spit of sexual possibility. I vaguely remember that as we got drunker we held each other. I seem to remember us both sobbing at some stage of the night. It wasn’t brother/sister either, not an incest taboo. No. We were once part of a multiform being, a many-celled organism that played in the childhood sea, that swam in the ocean of Brisbane, an alpha-helical membrane-embedded coiled-coil of an us-thing. We were not Other to each other or them, we were already Significantly Us, and we wept for our missing parts. We drank to our damaged, our lost, our dead.
When drink got us down to the ocean floor, I think Brian said: “It’s the house. I really believe that if I went there, I wouldn’t be able to breathe. I’d never get out of it alive.”
And I think I asked: “What did your mother mean about the nights? Those awful nights, she said.”
And the second I said it, a memory I didn’t remember I had shifted itself and began to rise like a great slow black-finned sea-slug, an extinct creature, far earlier than icthyosaurus, earlier than the earliest ancestor of the manta ray. It flapped the gigantic black sails of its fins and shock waves hit the cage of my skull and I was swimming back to Brian’s front gate, I was waiting for him there, fragrant currents of frangipani were swirling round, and these monstrously eerie sounds, this guttural screaming and sobbing, came pouring out through the verandah louvres in a black rush that whirlpooled around me, that sucked, that pulled … I clung to the gate, giddy with terror.
Then Brian came out of the house with his schoolbag slung over his shoulder and he pushed the gate open and pushed his way through and walked so fast that I had to run to catch up. “What is it?” I asked, my heart yammering at the back of my teeth.
“What’s what?” Brian demanded.
“That noise.” I stopped, but Brian kept walking. “That noise!” I yelled, and Brian stopped and turned round and I pointed, because you could almost see those awful sounds curdling around us. Brian walked back and stood in front of me and looked me levelly in the eyes and cocked his head to one side. He gave the impression of listening attentively, of politely straining
