Here Until August. Josephine Rowe
brother’s face is turned directly towards the sun. I study the frail red and gray blood vessels on his near-translucent eyelids, limpid as rock pool creatures down there in the deep set of his skull. The drive from the airport would have taken him past those crosses, the gleaming reinforced barrier.
What? he says from behind his closed eyes.
Nothing. You’re burning, you know.
Beaut. Fine by me. Six bloody summers …
Yeah yeah.
My wife falls in love with him, of course. Not in any way that could really be considered dangerous, just in the way I knew she would, the way people have always fallen in love with Fynn; quickly and easily and faithfully. It is so so so good to finally finally meet you, like a record jumping, and suddenly the crosses planted at the shoulder of the highway do not stand for two tiny girls and their singing-teacher mother. They stand for small-town intolerance, grudges borne longer than is fair or necessary, nourished by the kind of rural oxygen a larger city would have starved them of.
The two of them stand at the kitchen sink, elbow to elbow, debearding mussels. Cracking up over something I don’t catch. In high school the couple of girls I managed to bring home laughed just as easily for him, like they were trying to rouse some sleeping thing. Fynn, my older, whiter brother, who never felt the need to take me down a notch. Who’s always had everything going for him. Why do I still think of him this way? And why is there a moment, a flash in which I also think, skulked, snuck, hauled arse … after all the defending I’ve done in the years between the accident and here. Especially in the first months, with people murmuring and shaking their heads in the tinned-veg aisle, though all I have in common with Fynn is some blood.
I’m watching them over the top of my beer, my brother and my wife, somehow knowing, before it happens, that one of them is going to slice the paring knife through their palm, and the other is going to have an excuse to come at them with Dettol and cotton wool, and that I’m going to have to sit here and watch this. Then Fynn goes Ah Christ! but the gouge isn’t deep, doesn’t need Ti’s attention, and he gets on with the job of scraping away the hairy tendrils that once anchored the mollusk someplace it thought sturdy.
Soon enough we’re sitting around the table, butterflying shells between our fingers, using the halves for slurping up the briny liquor, the house filling with a fragrant, kelpy smell.
Ti has a theory about labor-intensive food, the kind where utensils are a waste of time and attempts at grace just make you clumsier. This theory holds: the empty shells pile up between us and the talk spills easy, as if we’ve been doing this every Saturday for years, the three of us.
The work’s mostly just menial stuff, Fynn says. Bottling, labeling. Keeping the mice offa the malt floor. Things I can’t mess up too bad. No hand in the art of it. But it’s enough to be in that landscape—that old, that immense. Part of you just disappears.
All of you just disappeared, I think.
Got a little boat, he’s saying. Take it out for sea trout on my days off. Bay of Isbister, Inganess …
When he says these names it’s with that glint, as though the words have been kept in the wrappers they came in.
We drink all the wine that wasn’t used to steam open the mussels, and when that’s done we crack Fynn’s wedding present. I uncork the heavy-based bottle, and the North Sea rushes into the room. I slosh out three glasses and we lift them to the wedding. We lift the next round to Dad’s bypass, then another to the cousin whose dive gear let him down, and all the things that Fynn shouldn’t have missed but did and oh well what can you do he’s here now, hey?
Ti’s giving me that watch it look. Fynn clears his throat and unfoots a mussel with a twist of fork, then goes back to seducing her with northernmost Scotland’s beauty and gloom. The peat slabs cut and lifted out of the ground, snaked through with heather roots and reeking of time. The salt air and natural violence that make their way into the bottle. The ocean and how it differs, how the memory of Western Australia shrinks right down to a pinhole. Standing at the edge of the Yesnaby Cliffs, clouds of guillemots beating frantic overhead.
Like the very ends of the earth out there, Fynn says.
Like the afterlife …? I edge in, and I can tell from how he looks at me that he doesn’t remember ever saying that, that he thinks I’m taking the piss. None of us are quite drunk enough to not be embarrassed by this, so I refill our glasses and we drink to our sister, whose sense of humor we incrementally destroyed.
The bottle makes seven or eight rounds before it’s drained, and by that stage Ti has tapped out, her sturdy brown legs drawn up beneath her on the couch, her dark hair curtaining her from our nonsense.
Without her voice to anchor us there comes a drift, a silence so big and awful that it could be holding anything, but I know what’s lurking within. I try to head it off with small talk, but Fynn just nods. Here it comes, I think. Here it is.
You’ve seen him around, I s’pose?
Who?
Fynn shakes his head, as if I’m the coward.
Yeah. I see him sometimes. Not all that often.
And?
Look. Fynn. There’s nothing I can tell you that’s going to make you feel less shitful about it. Last year I saw him at the Farmers’ Arms, and he looked like a man whose wife and kids had died five years ago. A few months back I saw him at the post office, and he looked like a man whose wife and kids had died six years ago. What else is there to say?
It happened in a heartbeat. In a glisk, Fynn has since said. Swerving to miss the dog that came trotting out of the scrub. Swinging his ute into the oncoming lane, into the oncoming sedan. Just a glisk, then. And the safety barrier just for show, apparently, eaten through by salt air and melting away like bad magic at the first kiss of fender.
I met a woman, Fynn says. Sweet clever type from the library. When I’d stay with her overnight, there’d be the sound of her kids running around the house in the morning. Sound of them laughing downstairs or talking in funny voices to the cat. It was too much, Raf. I couldn’t tell her. And I couldn’t stay.
I keep looking for something, my brother goes on. Something that’ll fill up this scooped-out place but drink doesn’t do it. Sex doesn’t do it. I walk, I walk a great fucking lot, and the wind there wants to rip you open, but it isn’t enough. I’ll think maybe I can lose it in a roomful of people, like it’ll be made to seem smaller somehow, but no, it’s like everyone can all already see it, smell it on me.
I make to recharge our glasses, then remember there’s nothing to recharge them with.
You want to know the best it gets? Really, the best it gets?
Come on, I tell him, get your stupid jacket.
I’m further over than he is but I know the last thing he wants is a steering wheel to hold. I climb in the driver’s side of Ti’s Golf, fix the mirrors while Fynn hides his eyes behind a pair of aviators.
You don’t want those. Anyway, you still look like you, just more of an arsehole. Everyone looks like an arsehole in aviators.
Right, he says, flinging them into the lantana.
Since Fynn left, some Perth kids came down and reopened the Kingfisher Hotel. The smoke-damaged collection of taxidermied birds that made it through the 2009 fire—suspected arson—are still roosting about the liquor shelves. The fiber optic thing is still there, the pool table is still there. But the bar’s been refitted, a big slab of reclaimed red gum, and behind it the top-tier stuff is seven tiers up, and the bartender has to put down his copy of the DSM-5 or whatever and hop a ladder to get to it.
These boys don’t know Fynn. These boys will pour him his drink without asking just how he likes being back home.
We take bar seats opposite a singed black cockatoo, its glassy eye on the rum selection. Fynn wins the wallet race, the leather split like overripe pawpaw,