Overland literary journal

OVERLAND 195
winter 2009
ISBN 978-0-9805346-2-7
published 21 May 2009

ELEVEN THINGS I KNOW ABOUT MY BROTHER

1

His wife Melissa used to say about my younger brother that he was never happier than when he was in transit. As soon as he returned from Singapore or Bangkok or Hong Kong or wherever his latest educational business venture had taken him he began planning for the next trip. It was not that he didn’t love his wife and kids. It was rather that there was some huge, hungering hole somewhere inside him that only travelling could fill.

Even his conversation – what little there was of it – was filled with references to travel. To frequent flyer points, ‘cattle class’, missed connections, adventures with metal detectors at various airports where his metal-tipped boots regularly set off alarms until he sensibly discarded them for travel. The times he had been upgraded to business or even first class. The quality and prices at duty-free airports. What you could and couldn’t bring into each country.

When the system of frequent flyer points was first introduced he thought it was Christmas. He discovered that if, like General MacArthur, he flew back-to-front, he could earn thousands of extra points. So he travelled erratically – from Melbourne to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Manila, Manila to Jakarta to Beijing – and all this to arrive eventually at Bangkok. The pattern of his travels must have resembled that of a thirsty man wandering in a desert. Was he taking his clothes off as he flew? It is my belief that my brother was personally responsible for the airlines changing their rules on frequent flyer points, after their computers eventually caught up with what he was doing. It was perhaps the greatest accomplishment of his life.

Long habit eventually made his organisation meticulous. He could have packed in his sleep. He always took with him three books, neatly categorised: one book of poetry, one novel and one book of non-fiction. Often the poet was Wallace Stevens; the novels were usually contemporary English, Ian McEwan or Julian Barnes or Martin Amis; and the non-fiction was always about the Second World War, in which he displayed a remarkable, and to my mind unhealthy, interest and knowledge.

Even his journeys by car followed the same pattern of unfailing similarity and precision. One Christmas Day he offered to pick me and my two sons up and drive us out to my sister’s place for Christmas lunch. ‘I’ll take Melissa out first at 10 am. She wants to get there early to help prepare the meal. Then I’ll come back for Alan and Melanie and we should leave about 12 noon.’

‘Don’t you mean 1200 hours?’ said my elder son Aaron.

‘Should we synchronise our watches?’ I asked.

‘Are you looking for frequent driving points?’ asked Joshua.

But my brother pressed on, as impervious to irony as ever. ‘I should be here at 12.15 to pick you three up.’

Usually, when he went on his business trips I would drive him out to the airport and meet him on his return. As a reward he would bring me a bottle of Scotch.

‘You have a thing about driving people out to the airport,’ Melissa said to me once.

‘No I don’t. I have a thing about Scotch.’

But in fact there was another subtler reason why I liked to drive him. It was the only time I got to talk to him. Cars can become involuntary tombs from which it is impossible to escape. They force intimacy upon even the unwilling.

2

My brother was always competent but never distinguished at school. What got him out of trouble with his teachers and the other students was that he had one remarkable skill. Every Friday morning he grabbed a copy of the Sun newspaper, as it was then, before anyone else in our household was up, read through all the newly announced League teams and within half an hour or so had memorised them perfectly, player by player, line by line. At school he was always tested by his classmates and always passed. They would point him out to acquaintances from other schools as some kind of freak, in whom they took a proprietary interest.

‘See that kid?’ they would say. ‘He can tell you every player in every side,’ they would say proudly, as if it were their own achievement.

3

For most of his adult life, my brother was a secondary school teacher, then a secondary school principal, in which capacity he voted himself out of a job. During the Kennett years he was on a committee that had been established to rule on which secondary schools were no longer viable and needed to be closed down – or, as the terms of their instructions put it, ‘rationalised’. He was the principal of a small inner city secondary college whose numbers were steadily declining. A principled principal, he felt he had no choice except to recommend the closure of his own school, much to the astonishment of the other members of the committee who had all been prepared to fight tooth and nail to assist him to keep it open.

I admired his integrity very much at the time, though I felt his motives were more complex than mere integrity suggested.

Let me explain.

Teachers who have worked within the educational system ever since they graduated eventually adopt a mode of thinking that is almost Manichean in its moral rigidity. They crave order and stability. They are prone to saying ‘firstly’, ‘secondly’, ‘thirdly’ and ‘finally,’ the points of enumeration usually being accompanied by appropriate gestures of their hands. They insist very firmly, if politely, on their verbal rights: ‘Excuse me, I haven’t finished speaking yet.’ They dress similarly to one another, the same elaborately informal clothes flung on with the same elaborately informal carelessness. Most of the men wear beards.

In pubs and restaurants they will argue for hours over whose turn it is to buy a round, or the portion of the bill each is responsible for according to how much he or she ate. A cappuccino can become the occasion for a duel of honour. Essentially, it is not meanness, though the atrociously low wages they are paid for difficult and demanding work are a factor, certainly. But it is more the application of that exaggerated sense of fairness, of righteousness even, that their profession induces in them. They spend their lives, after all, in settling disputes.

When my brother signed himself out of a job, he received a handsome payout and the offer of a position as a senior teacher in another inner suburban secondary college – a demotion, true, and probably another school that was scheduled for execution shortly, in which case my brother would have gone … where? But only a slight and perhaps even temporary one, a demotion that wouldn’t have bothered him. But he felt burned out, like so many teachers his age. Or did he see the pattern of self-demolition repeating itself? For whatever reason, he resigned from the department and resolved to go into business. And since he knew nothing about anything except education it had to be the education business. Naturally.

4

My brother never learned to use computers, even though his educational business was dependent on them. He would shrug off all attempts to assist him. He came from a long line of technological dinosaurs but was the most backward of all of them. When his first computer arrived it came with a huge stack of explanatory manuals. He unpacked the box, stared at the manuals, at the screen, at the cords and leads and assorted packets of material and gadgets, and groaned. He opened the first manual and began to read it. After fifteen minutes he had reached page five and was struggling to understand the instructions. He heard a noise and looked behind him. His son had hooked up the computer and was beginning to use it. At that time his son was eight years old.

One day he sat down at his desk, determined to master the machine by himself. His son, forbidden to offer instructions or assistance, watched him in silence. After a few minutes his son said, ‘Dad, I know you don’t want me to help but can I just say one thing? You can’t turn the computer on with the mouse.’

5

My two older brothers, only eleven months apart in age, fought all the time, though I suspect there was a deep bond between them that, in a typically Australian male way, expressed itself mainly in the form of physical aggression. I asked my younger brother once if I had been aggressive to him when we were kids. He thought for a while and said, ‘You never beat me up but you used to walk fast.’ I felt satisfied with this. I was pleased that even my sadism had a certain subtlety and grace about it.

Later, though, my brother took his revenge. We would go jogging together and, apart from the fact that he constantly veered across my path, he was too quick for me; I could never keep up. He would even maintain a conversation while I struggled even to breathe. After a while I didn’t care who was playing half-back flank for Richmond.

6

As he grew older and especially when he became ill, my brother fell back more and more often on established rituals and routines. There were repeated habits of language, certain phrases, jokes, automatic responses that he repeated unconsciously, almost as if he were in a trance. If someone mentioned the cinema he would murmur under his breath, ‘Fillum with a funnel’. He referred to ‘me and the other dog’ when his name came up in conversation, no matter how neutrally. Whenever he belched gently, which he did quite often, especially after he became ill, he would say, ‘Better an empty house than a bad tenant’. Of distant acquaintances whose names came up in casual conversation he would say, ‘I taught him everything I knew and now he knows nothing’. When he was told that unsolicited email was called spam he insisted on calling it sperm.

There was no suggestion that he expected any response to any of these remarks or that he was playing for laughs. Nor did he receive any. His wife and children had long ago become inured to his vocal eccentricities and were unruffled by them. I think they saw them, as I did, as a source of comfort to him, a sense that despite the illness that was invisibly eating away at him he could still fall back on the reassurance of regular routines. He held on to fixed habits in order to ward off the chaos into which his life was spinning. There was a kind of benign eccentricity, or eccentric benignity, in the determination with which he continued to impose that deceitful order upon his life.

It was for the same reason, I think, that he continued to make the trips to Asia to pursue his educational business interests. I have often wondered, since my brother died, how I would spend my last months if placed under a similar sentence. Not, certainly, as he did, as if everything was normal. I continued to drive him out to the airport, he would take the flight to Singapore, travelling on the midnight flight in order to save a day on hotel expenses, and a few days later I would drive out to the airport again to pick him up. Once, on the way home in the car, he explained to me what he was doing. He had devised, he told me, a set of written exercises to give to the students periodically so that the schools could monitor their progress, or lack of it. The Asians, especially the Chinese Asians, he told me, were very big on measuring educational outcomes, as he called them – though he himself preferred the more easygoing ways of the Indian Asians. He would go to a school, hand out the papers and supervise the students while they sat them, then gather them all up and take them back to his hotel room for marking. It was turning into quite a profitable enterprise and had he lived he might well have become the first person in our family to be successful in business.

For sixteen months, life went on as usual. My brother had lost weight and looked all the better for it. It was only in the last two months that the illness took hold of him and its ravages begin to show. I often wonder what he told those schools about why he would no longer be continuing.

7

There is, perhaps, a fine line between fatalism and courage, a grey area where the two merge indistinguishably into one another. Fatalism is a passive virtue only.

When my brother was diagnosed with cancer of the liver and bowel he was given eighteen months to live by his specialist. It was a diagnosis that proved uncannily accurate. Although, as I say, no external evidence of illness was exhibited, he was constantly reminded that this meant nothing, that there were no signs of remission. His specialist tried every technique he could think of, from chemotherapy to carving up my brother’s liver and removing the diseased parts in the hope that what was left would regenerate itself. It was a new approach, he said, which had only been devised about five years ago and had a high rate of success.

It failed. Throughout all this, in what must have been intense discomfort, my brother behaved with what I can only describe as stoic grace, or graceful stoicism.

There was no ‘Why me?’, no gnashing of teeth, no railing at the gods.

I wonder if, when I go to my death, I will behave with the same dignity.

8

As I write, my elder sister has been diagnosed with cancer of the lungs, the fourth sibling to be so placed under possible sentence of death. Even my dog has cancer and is passing blood in his urine. When a slight acquaintance visited my sister in her hostel she said, ‘I have some news, you know.’

‘Oh yes, what’s that?’ the acquaintance inquired.

‘I have a slight touch of lung cancer,’ my sister said proudly.

‘Oh,’ said the acquaintance, a little taken aback. ‘I thought it was going to be a piece of good news.’

Clutching her rosary beads my sister said admirably, ‘I’m not afraid of death, you know.’

But my sister is flying to the angels. My brother merely stared into the abyss. On reflection, I think my brother met death very bravely.

9

On the second last occasion on which I visited my brother in hospital he was heavily doped with morphine but still managed to tell me that the operation on his liver had failed and with it his last chance of recovery.

‘Shit,’ I said. There was a long pause. Neither of us could think of anything to say. ‘Richmond have delisted four players,’ I said finally. He concentrated his last reserves of energy and slowly named all four of them.

‘Spot on,’ I said. It was the last triumph of our mutual inarticulacy.

10

I had always wondered how my brother came to be married. One day, as I was driving out to the airport, he told me. ‘We had gone to Barcelona,’ he said, ‘for a holiday.’ She became ill and the whole two weeks were spent in bed. ‘She was in bed,’ he corrected himself, ‘and I was looking after her. She said I must be a kind person and have a kind family.’

He said that one night he said ‘What about it?’ and, after she understood what he meant, she said yes.

He said that years later she told him it was the most romantic proposal she had heard of since ‘Barkis is willin’ ’.

11

Angels are hovering around the site of my brother’s cremation. I cannot see them but I can hear the flapping of their wings. Or maybe they are vultures. Who knows? The noise they make with the whirring of their wings is very much the same.

Laurie Clancy is a freelance Melbourne writer.
© Laurie Clancy
Overland 195-winter 2009, p. 94

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