Here Until August. Josephine Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, gaping fifties.

      You need to carry all that around?

      From the Travelex. 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 СКАЧАТЬ