Christos Tsiolkas - Barracuda

Dan breathed in the eucalypt, the scent of wattle.

Theo was silent; he had let the joint burn down to the end, and now he flicked it across the yard.

Dan opened his mouth, but now that he had let the words loose, let them run, he could feel the old caution return. This is a story, Theo, he could have said. I’ve just told you a story. The truth he knew abounded with sound, a pulse beating to infinity, an ocean of only waves; there was too much sound to be trapped in words. Dan shut his mouth.

‘Maybe you’re searching too hard, mate.’ Theo’s voice was also wary, he too was trying to catch sound and trap it into words. ‘Maybe Clyde is enough? Maybe if you just gave it time, you’d find that being with Clyde would fill that hole? Isn’t that possible?’

Dan knew he could break his brother now, the way you squashed ants, breaking backs and souls with the press of a finger. Annalise doesn’t want you, bro, you’re not enough for her. He could crush him if he wanted to.

‘It’s not going to happen, Theo. It’s over.’

‘You sure?’

‘I’m a thirty-year-old man and I’m not sure about anything. That’s the only thing I know — that I’m still not sure of anything.’

With a shudder — from the winter chill? from Dan’s words? — Theo got up. The laptop was sitting on the step. ‘You can check your emails if you like. The connection’s stuffed out here but you can log on in the kitchen.’

‘I don’t need to, thanks though.’

‘Yeah.’ Theo rolled his eyes. ‘You know you never answered one of my emails?’

Was this another thing to be sorry about, another reprimand to bear?

‘Not that it matters, mate, truly.’ Theo’s tone was conciliatory, tender. ‘It was kind of nicer to get the postcards. I really looked forward to your postcards.’

‘I liked writing them.’

‘See you in the morning, bro.’

‘See you.’

Theo was still standing nervously in the doorway. He then stepped down and offered Dan the most blundering but earnest of hugs, from behind, his arms tight around his brother’s chest. Dan could smell him, the sweat and the tobacco, the dope and the soap on his skin. Theo let go of him and went back up the steps and opened the screen door. But he still didn’t go in, he kept the door ajar with his foot.

‘Are you still planning to drive up to see Regan on Saturday?’

Dan nodded. He’d come home to see Regan.

‘I’ve been working like a dog, mate, everyone in this city is building an extension or renovating or building apartments.’ Theo was hesitant, shy. ‘If you want, I can drive up with you. Nowra’s a long drive — we could share it.’

Dan had been dreaming of being alone on the open road, where the expanse of sky and the earth reached to the end of the universe. He had been looking forward to driving it alone, heading for that sky on his own.

But he heard the question and the plea in his brother’s voice and he said, ‘Yeah, of course, that would be great.’

Dan took his brother’s laptop into the kitchen. He sat at the table with his finger hovering over the keyboard, over the mouse, to enter Safari or Firefox, to answer that siren call, that infernal music, the spinning electrons, the percussion of information. His finger hovered over the mouse and then he decided, banging on the keyboard, entering a portal, the spinning letters on the screen forming the word google . For the first time in his life he was going to put in his name, he was going to search for his name. He had never let himself do that before, knowing what he would find, that the record of his shame would be there for all to see: the details of his failure, of his fall — what he did, how he was punished. It would all be there, the tantrum in the pool in Japan, the howling selfish boy, the degradation, the awful failure. He would type in the words Daniel Kelly, swimmer , and then would be shame and infamy and revulsion. He held his breath. He typed: Daniel Kelly, swimmer . The electrons sparked and the screen transformed, he was astounded by the speed of the machine. He read down the list with dread; there was a Dan Kelly in the US and there was a musician and an architect and he read about a family reunion of a woman called Margaret Kelly somewhere in Canada. Though he scrolled and scrolled, though he tapped the keys again and again, there was no record of him, no evidence. There was nothing about him at all.

At that moment he realised that it hadn’t all been about being better and faster and stronger; that hadn’t been all he’d wanted. It had also been to make a mark, to be a photograph and an image, to be a record and a name. To be a name . There was no mark and there never would be. No one knew his name.

Dan could feel the blood rushing violently to his cheeks. With a savage strike he hit quit and the electrons danced. The photograph of his brother and Annalise glimmered there, the colours sharper than life, the intensity of a child’s painting, and this time softly he tapped buttons and the photograph briefly shimmered before the colours washed away. The screen was blue and then it was white and then it was black. All that remained was his face reflected in the glass.

When Dan awoke, his brother had already left for work, and so had his mother. It was just him and his father in the house. His dad was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper, wearing a Collingwood sweatshirt and his pyjama bottoms. Dan could see his granddad Bill in his father’s features. A record was playing in the lounge room, an old song that Dan recognised from his earliest days. Help me, information, get in touch with my Marie . His father looked up, nodded at him, abruptly folding the paper and pushing it aside.

‘Do you want a coffee, son?’ he asked, then added, ‘This country’s fucked, mate. I don’t know why you came back.’

Dan watched his father rinsing the espresso pot at the sink. The years of long-haul driving were starting to show: there was a stoop to the man’s shoulders, and though his limbs were still thin and sinewy, his middle and his buttocks had ballooned. It was this disparity in the man’s shape, the body parts that somehow didn’t quite fit, that made Neal Kelly finally an old man.

Dan picked up the paper, glancing at the front page, something about the mining industry, something about tax. His father had settled the pot on the flame and sat down opposite Dan, pointing to the paper. ‘Can you believe it? Do you know what’s happening?’

Dan shook his head.

‘Guess what happens here isn’t really of much interest to the folk back in Scotland, is it?’

And there wouldn’t be anything about Scotland in the papers here, thought Dan, that was the way of the world. Behind his father he could see leaflets and photographs curling under fridge magnets: a rainbow-coloured stencil of Barack Obama, the green triangular masthead of the Greens, the photographs of himself, of Theo, of Regan, of Layla, the new baby, a sticker from the TWU that read, Carrying Australia , a black and white postcard of a young Keith Richards collapsed on a chair, his eyes shut, a cigarette between his lips. There was the Aboriginal flag, the beginnings of a shopping list, and a card he’d sent from Scotland, the brilliant, still stretch of the Great Glen.

His father was still ranting, about how the resources of the country belonged to everyone, how the mega-rich mining companies had been flooding the media with their propaganda and fear, how the country was selling all its ore and minerals and wealth to the Chinese and how there would be nothing left for his grandchild.