I closed all my accounts when I left Australia.
You really weren’t planning on coming back, huh.
Guess I wasn’t.
There are Fynn’s hands, threaded mangrove-like around his glass. Roughened by work that has nothing to do with him, work that carries nothing of himself. In my shed there’s a second table and a set of chairs and a bookshelf. In February it heats up to a million degrees in there—six bloody summers—all the wood has buckled and split along the joins, the wires gone slack or snapped, all that careful tension ruined. I should have kept them in the house. I should have driven into Perth this morning, been there waiting when he hefted his bag off the luggage carousel. Now it’s all I can do to lift my pint glass and meet his.
Lang may yer lum reek, Fynn says, rs rolling all over the place.
And may the mice never weep in your pantry, or whatever.
Close enough—where’d you turn that up, now?
Oh, y’know. I shrug and swallow beer froth. Scooped it out of the punnet.
Fynn grins down into his collar. Can ya move the Camira? I need to get the Torana out to get to the Commodore.
And the laughter that finally finds us feels very frail, but true enough, an echo rippling from the thousand family dinners spinning off lines from the same stupid shows while Mum cracked up in spite of herself, and Dad threatened to drive us out into the bush and lose us.
Of course the guy was always going to appear, company cap pulled low, eyes shaded from the glare of pool table fluorescents. It takes him a moment—I see it, my brother sees it—to register that it’s really Fynn sitting here, and when he does it’s as if all the doors have blown open at once, the air pressure changes that fast. And if the glasses in their corral don’t shatter, and the stuffed birds don’t take flight … if the tables don’t upend of their own accord, it’s only because of the steadying hand someone puts on the fella’s shoulder, guiding him back to the game, to his shot, to the rip of felt as he jabs too hard with the cue, the crack of the white against the five and the grinding roll in the belly of the table as the ball is captured there.
’Shot, someone says.
Fynn is already fumbling at the zip on his jacket.
Sit down, I tell him. Finish your drink.
Raf, we can’t stay here.
Well, I’m finishing mine. I take a long, purposeful swallow to show him.
Fynn doesn’t reach for his. Is he looking?
Christ, I’m not looking to see if he’s looking.
I can’t just sit here and pretend like … I should go say something.
What’s to say? I told you, there’s nothing. Just finish your drink, for fuck’s sake. (When what I’d meant to say was: Brother. Be still. We’re okay here.)
Fynn sits down, visibly shrinking inside the jacket’s bulk. I watch this, and I don’t know what good I’m trying to force. Or even if it’s good.
Right, I tell him, setting my glass beside his. You’re right. Jiggety-jig.
The way home is all roadkill and future roadkill—scarpering night creatures—streaking through the high beams. Bundles of fluff and mashed feathers at the side of the road.
Acquitted, I remind him. Everyone knew it was not his intention to run three quarters of a family off a sandstone bluff. Everyone understood that. At least officially.
Okay, yes, it’s awful, it’s tragic, but it wasn’t your fault.
How much quiet is there before Fynn clears his throat and goes, Listen. Raf? There never was any dog.
I say, How do you mean, no dog? Because I had seen the dog. Just as clearly as if I’d been riding shotgun for that nightmare. Fynn’s described it a hundred times—that mongrely, greyhoundish thing, ribs on display through its sorry sack of gray skin. The way it skittered out of the scrub like a wraith. Looking over its scrawny shoulder, as though something back there had spooked it senseless.
There just wasn’t. I don’t … Can we leave it at that?
No, I think. No, we cannot leave it at that. But I drive the dark highway and keep quiet. Where had it gone then, the dog? Fynn had looked for it, in the first hundred versions of the story. He’d stood at the mangled safety barrier and dialed triple zero—that part is fact; that part is on the record—and wondered, moronically, he said, where the fucking dog had got to. Because I wanted to kick it. His right knee bloody and ragged from where it had been crushed up against the ignition. A BAC of 0.03. Two beers, sober enough. This is also on the record.
If not the dog?
I roll us in, silent, to the driveway. Past Fynn’s rental car, which has been tipped up on its side, exposing its shiny undercarriage. We get out and stand beside it without speaking for a moment, the air full of insect and sprinkler music.
Happens all the time, I lie. It’s what these kids out here tip instead of cows.
How many people would that take?
Probably doesn’t weigh much more than a cow. Should we flip it back?
It only takes a halfhearted shove. The car lands with a crunch that brings about a flurry of curtain movement all up and down the street but nothing breaks and no one yells. The passenger door is scraped up and the wing mirror is cactus.
Insurance?
Fynn just breathes in long and deep through his nose.
No way it’s connected, this and the blokes at the bar. They were still there when we left. Just one of those freak coincidences. I’m saying all this to Fynn and he’s saying nothing.
Inside, Ti has left the couch made up with sheets and pillows, and laid the coffee table—Fynn’s coffee table—with a glass of water and a pack of aspirin.
Keeper, Fynn says, with a smile so pissweak I have to tell him g’night.
Ti gives a little moan as I slide in with her, fit my knees into the backs of hers. My chest against her spine, face pushed into her hair. Her hair smells like the ocean. I slide my hand between her thighs, not really to start something, just to be there, and we stay tangled like that, drifting nearer to and farther from sleep, until headlights flood the room.
It’s nearly 3 a.m. when he shows up, swaying out there on the lawn. The father, the widower. So drunk he’s practically dancing, a boxer or bear.
He pounds the door fit to unhinge it, but his voice is surprisingly soft when he says, It’s not right. It’s not right that it’s me coming to you.
No, I hear Fynn answer. I know it’s not.
There’s the click of the screen door as he steps onto the veranda, before I can tell him, Don’t. Don’t say shit. About the dog. About the complete lack of dog. He doesn’t need to know. Don’t say a damn word.
I drag the sheet with me into the hallway, holding it around my waist. Through the flywire I watch the two of them cross the lawn towards the street, then farther on into the night air, away from the house. Away from help. My brother wading out into the dark and the dark folding over the top of him like a wave. No right thing now, no best thing. Nothing so easy as lifting a child onto his shoulders and carrying her safely above the grabbing sea.
It’s Blind Willie McTell playing when they carry her out. “I Got to Cross the River Jordan,” one of the later, elliptical versions, where he lets the guitar finish half his lines. Nobody can … but Lord I got to … in that cold clay. Later I’ll get snagged on the morbid coincidence of this and Jody will shrug it off as nothing, point out that pretty much any blues