David Malouf: The Complete Stories

He wasn't, but he found a problem at times where the rest of us did not, and to a point of inertia that infuriated Stuart (who suspected him, I think, of doing it deliberately) was puzzled by circumstances, quite ordinary ones, that the rest of us took for granted. Other kids found him slow. Some of them called him a dill.

I understood Braden's puzzlement because I shared it at times, and since we were always together, I took it that we were puzzled in the same way. I had for so long been paired with Braden, we had shared so many discoveries and first thoughts, that I had assumed we were in every way alike; that in all the hours we had spent spinning fantasies and creating other lives for ourselves, we had been moving through the same landscape and weather, and were one. When Stuart told us, "You two are weird. You're weird,” I was pleased to see in his savage contempt the confirmation that in Stuart's eyes at least we were indistinguishable.

I did not want to know what I had already begun in some part of me to suspect. That Braden's oddness might be quite different from anything I could lay claim to.

For as long as I could remember, we had known, each one, what the other was thinking. The same things amused or excited or scared us. Now, almost overnight, it seemed, Braden knew stuff I had never dreamed of. His mind was engaged by questions that had never occurred to me, and the answers he came up with I could not follow. It was a habit of mind, I thought, that must have been there from the start, but moving underground in him and hidden from me; a music, behind the rambling stories he told, that I had all along been deaf to.

At the same time, in the six months before he turned fifteen, he put on height, six inches, and bulked up to twelve and a half stone. He was suddenly a big fellow. Bigger than either of his brothers. Not heavy, but big.

Then one day he showed me, in a copy of Scientific American, what it was that he was into. Cybernetics. I had never heard the word, and when he tried to explain it to me in his usual style, all jumps and sideways leaps into a silence I had believed I could interpret, I was lost.

I understood the science well enough. Even the figures. What I could not grasp was the excited vision of what he saw in it: a realm of action he saw himself moving through as if it had come into existence precisely for him. And this was the opening of a gap between us. Not of affection — no question of that — but of where our lives might take us. Braden, who had always been so vague and out of it, was suddenly the most focused person I knew. Utterly single-minded and sure of what he wanted and what he was for.

For the first time in my life I felt lonely. But not so lonely, I think, so finally set apart as he felt. From his family. His brothers. Who were still puzzled by him but in a new way.

Here he was, a big boy who had outgrown them and his own strength, and ought, in springing up and filling out, to have become a fellow they could deal with at last on equal terms. Instead he seemed odder than ever. More difficult to get through to. Content to be away there in his own incommunicable universe.

Glen, who had always had a soft spot for the boy was confused, but also I think impressed. He still teased him, but in a soft-handed affectionate way. As if Braden's difference, which had always intrigued him, had turned out to be something he might respect.

Glen, because he was so much older, had for the most part left us alone. We had always been a source of mild amusement to him, but except for the odd burst of impatience he had, in a condescending, big-brotherly way, ignored us. Stuart could not.

In the early days the mere sight of us drove him to fury. All jeers and knuckles, he was always twisting our arms and jerking them up under our shoulder blades to see how much we could take before we turned into crybabies and sissies.

He felt easier with me, I think, because I fought back. Braden disarmed him by taking whatever he could dish out with scornful defiance, never once, after our baby years, yielding to tears.

All this, I knew, belonged to a side of their life together that I had no part in, to hostilities and accommodations, spaces shared or passionately disputed, in rooms, at the table, in their mother's affection or their father's regard or interest.

But the fullness of the change in Braden, when it finally revealed itself, dismayed Stuart. He simply did not know what to do with it.

I think it scared him to have someone who was close, and who ought therefore to have been knowable, turn out to be so far from anything he could get a hold on. It suggested that the world itself might be beyond his comprehension, but also beyond his control. The only way he could deal with Braden was by avoiding him. Which made it all the more odd, I thought, that he began at the same time to latch on to me.

He had left school by now, was working in a garage and ran with a set of older fellows, all of whom were wild, as he was, and “reputations.” But suddenly we were always in one another's path.

He would appear out of nowhere, it seemed, on my way back from the pool, and offer me dinks on his bike. And when he exchanged his Malvern Star for a Tiger Cub he would stop, talk a bit, and offer to take me pillion.

I was wary. I had too often been on the wrong side of Stuart's roughness to be easy with him. It was flattering to be treated, in my own right, as a grown-up, but I did not trust him. He was trying to win me over. Why? Because he had seen the little gap that had opened up between Braden and me and wanted to widen it? To bring home to me that if Braden was odder than any of us had thought, then I had proved to be, like Stuart himself, more ordinary?

I resented his attention on both counts, and suspected that his unlikely interest in me was a form of mockery. It took me a while to see that mockery was not Stuart's style, and that by seeking me out, a younger boy and the brother of a girl he was sweet on (I learned this amazing fact from a bit of conversation overheard while I was sunbaking on the bleachers at the pool), he was putting himself helplessly in my power; making himself vulnerable to the worst mockery of all. That he trusted me not to take advantage of it meant that I never would of course, but I hated the familiarity with which he now greeted me “Angus, old son,” “Angus, old horse,” as if there was already some special relationship between us, or as if getting close to me brought him closer somehow to her. My own belief was that Stuart McGowan was just the sort of rough, loud fellow she wouldn't even look at. Then suddenly he and Katie were going out together, and he was at our house every night of the week.

Taking a break from my homework or the book I was absorbed in, and going through to the kitchen to get a glass of water or cold milk from the fridge, I would hear them whispering together on the couch in our darkened front room, and would turn the tap on hard to warn them I was about.

Or if it was late enough, and Stuart was leaving, I would run into them in the hall: Stuart looking smug but also, somehow, crestfallen, Katie hot and angry, ready I thought to snap my head off if I said more in reply to his “ ‘lo, Angus, how's it going?” than “Hi, Stuart,” and ducked back into my room.

The truth was, I had no wish to know what was going on between them. I did not like the look of shy complicity that Stuart cast me, as if I had caught him out in something, but in something that as another male I must naturally approve.

Two or three nights each week he ate with us. I have no idea what he thought of the noisy arguments that marked our mealtimes. Perhaps it attracted him, as I was attracted by the old-fashioned formality I found at the McGowans'.

Occasionally, to kill time while Katie was helping in the kitchen, he would drift to the sleepout on the side veranda where I would be sprawled on my bed deep in a book. I would look up, thinking, God, not again, and there he would be, hanging awkwardly in the open doorway, waiting for me to acknowledge him and taking my grunt of recognition as an invitation to come in.