Where There's Smoke Read Online Free PDF

‘I know I can’t tell you what to do. But I’m your mother and I don’t want my sons to be angry with each other.’
    I turn around. My brother’s mouth is slightly open, sly at one corner.
    â€˜I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here. I want my sons to look after each other.’ She speaks with care, a prepared grace. ‘Your father would want that too. Remember when you were children, you looked after each other.’
    In grade three, when my parents found out I was being bullied, they left it to my brother to beat up the malefactor. Recess the next day Thuan climbed out of the concrete playground tunnel from one end, then, a long minute later, Matty Fletcher from the other, smiling with his mouth full and one hand low on his gut. My family used to bring this up at every chance. Now, Mum stops, following the thought to its logical implication. Another track cut off next to a night river. Nothing, during the trial, was so cruel as watching the jury coaxed and coerced by weeks of ‘similar fact evidence’ alleging Thuan’s propensity for violence – until it was all anyone could see of him. She must have been confounded, afterwards, by the new plot of her life – how, whether forward or back, it inescapably led her, as it did both her sons, to that one night – as though it were exactly where we were all meant to be.
    â€˜I’ve been saving some money,’ she says.
    â€˜Ma.’ His insouciance has settled now.
    â€˜I need you to come to the bank with me later. To sign some papers. If you have time.’
    â€˜Listen, Ma, I don’t need money.’
    â€˜You’re the oldest, so I want you to look after it.’
    For a moment no one speaks. In the yellow emptiness behind the window I hear voices, strains of Asian opera riding the hot red wind from a different floor, maybe a different building. The glass-warmed sun on my face. I’m brought back to mornings waking up when my pillow is so suffused with sun, the air through the open window so full of a sense of lost summer, that I clench my eyes closed again, coach those voices at the bottom of my hearing to sing louder, bear higher their meaning.
    â€˜Child,’ says Mum, her tone finally relaxing. ‘You’re too good for money now?’
    Thuan leans back at the table, slightly embarrassed.
    Mum stands up, brushing smooth her silk pyjama top. ‘Heavens,’ she says, ‘it’s been so long since I saw you. I’m going to tell you the truth – I didn’t know if I would see you again.’ Then, with her usual restraint, she checks herself. Smiling privately, as though she’s decided she has all the time she needs, she picks up the jug and heads into the kitchen to make more iced tea.
    *
    â€˜So Baby.’
    The lift drops with the sound of metal squealing against itself.
    â€˜Two or three years ago,’ I say. ‘It was an accident, they think.’
    He looks straight ahead. ‘OD?’
    I nod.
    â€˜She was still in Footscray?’
    â€˜Yeah, probably. I think so. I saw her – she was all straightened out.’
    He frowns, maybe sensing my lie. ‘Not if she was still hanging out in Footscray she wasn’t.’ It’s the first time I’ve heard an edge of the old hard tone. ‘Jesus,’ he mutters. The lift opens, and I follow him through the two security doors back out into the heat.
    In the presentations I’ve been asked to give, I generally concentrate on sociological factors until the inevitable moment I find myself nudged towards the incident. The cops at our door two days later, their duteous, scornful faces, all the scorn sucked into their eyes and the edges of their mouths as if to curb them from asking, What kind of animals are you? That you could do this to your own? These are not, I think, unfair questions. But the people who turn to me for answers aren’t looking to my master’s in