Gravity Read Free Page B

sombre monotone of his daily life. Sometimes, at the pub, he’d pretend to smile and laugh but it never seemed sincere tome. Never seemed real. He loved the grief in his life. It sustained him and had done since he was a kid. Since his old man drowned, the week before his seventh birthday. His life was powered by calamity and tempered by the good Lord. My leaving town would come as a shock, and then his prayers would find a new theme and vigour, like when Mum had left a few months before. There was no ranting or steam or tears, just more silent prayer. The casseroles had just started appearing in the fridge – the people of Splitters Creek watching our world falling apart and trying to prop it up with offerings of food. I wouldn’t miss the fact that they knew everything about us. I wouldn’t miss the fact that there was nowhere to hide.
    As I travelled down the hill to freedom, I thought about my brother, too. I remembered when Simon drove me to Catalpa just after his eighteenth birthday. I was fifteen and he thought it would be fun to get me pissed. We rattled over in the Cortina with his girlfriend, Tori, and best mate, Patchy. And it was fun. For a while.
    That night, Simon told me that you see the real person when they’re pissed. He said that the mask falls away and you get the truth of their soul. They might be polite and funny when they’re a little bit ripped but when they get shit-faced they turn violent or tell their mates that they love them or get melancholy or start crying. Or want to kill themselves. Or kill someone else. Or all of the above.
    I took Tori’s advice and stopped drinking after three beers. I was feeling unsteady and fragile around Simon. He may have been my brother, but I didn’t trust him. I watched him as he went from happy to jovial and on through to untidy.He was right though: the drunker he got, the nastier he turned, until my brother was standing there before me, stripped bare of the mask of kindness he’d worn every day of our lives. His ‘golden child’ mask. Sometimes it seemed I was the only person on earth who knew he was wearing it. It was so complete, so thoroughly convincing to Mum and Dad and the kids and teachers at school and everybody in Splitters Creek, that saying anything negative about him proclaimed me as a heretic. His demeanour of innocence was so good that I began to wonder if I was the one with the problem. Don’t be ridiculous, Mum would say. Simon wouldn’t steal your toy car-boat-plane-gun. You must have left it somewhere. You’re always losing things.
    But the truth was – as Simon revealed that night he got wasted – he buried my things. Dug them into the soft loam in the backyard. He laughed when he told me but it was a hollow laugh, brittle with jealousy. Simon couldn’t stand me being happy.
    And the teachers who compared me to my brother were treading on very thin ice.
    It’s unsettling how different two brothers can be, they’d say.
    As well as being school captain, Simon was also the mystery man who emptied the litre of vodka into the punch at his year nine social. And the bag of prawns under the dash of Mrs Corcoran’s VW? Yeah, that was the captain of the school footy team – regional champions four years in a row. Hadn’t they ever wondered why so many kids that played against our school went home bloodied and broken? Simon told me that he wouldn’t bother standing on the grass if therewas a perfectly good hand or face he could use. Not particularly creative, but Simon was never the creative type. Just hard and nasty to sly perfection.
    He developed his underhanded skills on the field playing all-terrain footy. Mum hated us playing near the road when we were little so we played footy with the other kids on the only flat piece of ground available to us – Nigel Fenton Reserve. The tiny park was peppered with saplings, bisected by the creek and had a timber picnic