Excerpt 3

When you’re drinking, it doesn’t matter whether you know the people you spend time with. You’re all just so happy to have company. We sit on a long couch that extends across the back wall of the upstairs room in the club. People talk over circle tables across from the couch. This is not a booth, this is not our contained world, we are connected with the other drinkers. I drain the rest of my beer. I need to be drunk. I need to feel connected. A guy sitting next to me starts to clap.

“Reeehh!” he says, and puts his arm around me. He takes a large gulp from his own lager, letting it spill over his face. He wipes away the dripping lager with his forearm and then levers his head upward to belch loudly; using his whole torso to create an impressive rumble that sounds like thunder from a distance. He turns to me and raises his eyebrows. Is he trying to challenge me?

“You alright, mate?” he says.

“Yes, are you well?”

“Fucking ace, mate!” he nods drunkenly.

I wonder what he means with his insistence of the word, ‘mate’. I wonder if he truly means to befriend me, and if he thinks that by calling me ‘mate’ he can convince me that we are already friends. I am not easily manipulated, and don’t appreciate when people are dishonest with me. Why can’t we be more accurate with our labels, and call each other ‘Stranger’ or ‘Suspicious Drunk’?

Kanye West says, “Let's get lost tonight, you can be my black Kate Moss tonight.”
“Fucking choon!” says Excessive Lad.

“We’re gonna hit the dance floor again,” says Fraser, “you coming?”

As much as I want to be away from Uneducated Troglodyte, I can’t stand the thought of re-entering that pit of sweating and oversexed bodies. “I’ll stay here,” I say.

“You sure?” says Daisy, surprised that I’d picked bonding with a male stranger over the euphoria of the dance floor.

My housemates leaves, but Meathead’s arm remains. Has this not overstepped the mark of masculine camaraderie to a come on? His friends seem to think nothing of it. They look as trashed as he does. His arm connects me, by association; I’ve now become part of his group.
I look around the room to see who is looking at me. I will meet their eyes and tell them that this is normal. Do I want to be part of this group? I want to join this group as much as I want Kevin to pant in my face. People can’t tell this though, there’s no way they can read my thoughts, but they can read my face. And what face am I wearing? I try to smile, but it probably looks unconvincing. People can tell a fake smile, there are a lot of facial muscles that don’t get used in a fake smile. I’ve read you can tell by looking at the eyes. I wouldn’t have this problem online; there is time to edit yourself, to present whatever image you choose. There are representative emoticons. Smileys. I will wear a smiley. Maybe people won’t notice, I’ll be so normal. Maybe too normal, strikingly normal. But someone has noticed.

She’s tall and slender, like a model. It’s times like these you realise that most girls aren’t built like models. Most girls are short and fat or tall and broad – bulky. She’s not a model at all, no ones looking up to her (besides literally), she’s a freak. She sticks out like a sore thumb on a row of toes. I notice her because she’s just come up the stairs. I notice her because the first thing she does is look at me. She looks at me as if she was looking for me, and now she’s found me, she’s not turning away.

We lock eyes, something I’m not usually good at. I find it hard to maintain eye contact with women because when you see them looking at you it means they can see you looking at them. She’s walking over now, and she’s biting her lip. She’s got something to ask me or something important to tell me and I can’t look away. I just can’t believe she’s still looking at me, and coming towards me, just as if we know each other. Do we know each other? Perhaps sometime from the first semester? Is her name Karen?

She’s crossed half the room now and isn’t changing course, it’s too much now. I break her gaze and look to the rugby players that I’ve somehow become a part of. I don’t want her to think this is who I am. I take Meathead’s arm from around my neck and place it in his lap. He turns to me, looking hurt. I just rejected him. He then turns to the girl fast approaching, and his mouth falls open stupidly.

She strides the whole way, and doesn’t break her motion until she’s sitting next to me. I continue staring ahead. If I keep looking ahead, maybe we’ll just forget that we were even looking at each other. She’s sitting so close to me, her hip is touching mine, and she’s cold, as if she were a dead body left to float down stream. She floated and drowned for so long, but then she finally shored and she got up and sat next to me. She could be dead or in my head, but Meathead saw her. In fact, he’s still looking at her.

“Ahrun?” she says, turning to me.

Our faces are very close now. I can’t smell her breath, but I’m worried she can smell mine.

“Yeah,” I say.

“I know your brother, David.”

“You mean, knew.”

“Yes, I knew him very well.”

I’m almost afraid to ask, and I already think I know the answer, “Were you his girlfriend?”

“Yes, at one point. Your brother had a lot of girlfriends.”

“My brother had a lot of girlfriends,” I say in wonder. Of course, it makes perfect sense. He was handsome, though not as handsome as me, and a genius, and a charmer. He was always the charmer. I guess I figured he’d be a catch, but he never told me about his girlfriends.

Meathead says, “Mate, do you know this bird?”

“Natalie,” she corrects.

“She knew my brother,” I say.

“Who was your brother?”

“David Misen,” says Natalie.

“Misey?” Meathead says back, his eyes becoming moons.

What the fuck does he mean, Misey?

“Lads, lads” Meathead says to his fellow Meatheads, “this is fuckin’ Misey’s brother!”
The rugby players all turn to me with the same mooneyes as Meathead. I am the brother of David Misen. I am the brother of a dead guy. The amount of awe is overwhelming, there is too much of it for anyone to say anything, only for them to breathe heavily and gape. I’ve had to become used to this reaction, no doubt they will now feel impelled to share their experiences with me.

“Mate,” says one of them, “your brother was a good player. He was a fucking tank. I mean, he was a fucking weed, but people just couldn’t take him down. It was like his feet were roots that went deep into the earth, he was always upright. At the end of every game his kit was always as clean as when he first put it on,” he licks his lips. “It was like people were afraid of touching him. Like they might break him. No one wanted to be responsible for destroying something so rare; there was so much potential in those bones, in that face. You could see it. And when people grabbed hold of him, their hands never stayed, like they got burned, like he was on fire.”

A hushed sense of held breaths falls over the rugby players, as if they think their words might break what is left of David. This is all that is left of David, the words of others. Even the music seems to have drop a few notches, out of respect, but more like it’s been muted by a filter that makes it sound like it’s on the other side of a wall. They do this in dance tracks.

“Why the fuck he have to go kill himself?” The players turn to me, looking to me for the answer to this question. And who else are they going to turn to. I’m his brother. I’m the brother of someone who killed himself. Only he didn’t kill himself.

What they’re looking for is family tragedy, so I’ll tell them what they think they know, “David was a genius, but he paid the price. He thought too deeply about things. Things that are best not thinking about.” Of course this untrue. David was the most well adjusted person I knew, at least in our family. Our family has a history of malfunction. My grandfather and two uncles committed suicide. My dad might have killed himself if he hadn’t have been killed first. History has a way of repeating itself, and when suicide gets into a family, it gets set on a loop. The same story, again and again. I always figured it would be me. I think even my mum thought it would be me. I’ve felt something from when I was about six. A very real desire, sometimes a whimsy to extinguish my life, or just a life. I become paralysed when I cross over railway bridges. What if I were to suddenly throw myself over? Half an hour later I think, I could be dead now. I can’t decide whether this is terrifying or liberating. It doesn’t seem so bad to not be living anymore.
Natalie says, “Your brother became very distant before he died.”

“The last time I spoke to him, he was happy,” I said, “then three months later we received a phone call to inform us of his death.”

“He became very preoccupied in his final months, he wasn’t his usual self.”

“Did he become involved with anyone? Dangerous people?”

“He was involved with everyone. Everyone knew him, and everyone loved and admired him.”

“David didn’t do this to himself. He couldn’t. He wasn’t able to.”

“You don’t think David killed himself?”

He mustn’t have killed himself. It’s important to me that he didn’t kill himself.