“Yes, twenty minutes apart, so Eugene’s actually the older of the pair.”
“And yet so much smaller!”
“Well, he had a problem breathing. He was in the humidicrib for three days. He looked like an angry little beetroot-faced Hampshire. We thought he wouldn’t pull through and we had the Father baptize him right there, in the Calvary Hospital wards, lest his immortal soul end up in Limbo. Meanwhile, his brother Kenny took to the breast like a poddy calf, always butting and butting and crying out for more!”
“Beetroot-faced Hampshire! Ha! Well, Kenny’s certainly a bonny little piglet now! Such handsome brown curls, he’ll be popular with the ladies, I bet!”
“Yes, well, they’re twins, so I daresay Eugene will be a handsome young man in his own right, some day.”
“Oh, of course he will, darl, in his own right... ”
And that’s how the disparity between the two boys was always explained to well-meaning busybodies by their nervous but well-meaning mother. Mrs Fairbairn, such a soft and vulnerable mother sow, was constantly craving for lust or hurt, and sadly felt too often that her children were sufficient proof of her not deserving either.
Kenny Fairbairn, although second out the baby chute, had certainly gotten the head start nutritionally while Eugene struggled for life in the hospital. So grew accordingly. And Eugene was frequently ill in bed whereas Kenny recovered from the various childhood afflictions all Australian kiddies caught with what seemed like superhuman speed.
The days alone in his sickbed were not wasted, however, for Eugene was a voracious reader. First of all were the Little Golden Cliché Books that he un-guiltily stole from the oft-attended doctors’ waiting rooms, which were well enough to start anyone’s reading career, but then he was consuming volume after volume of The World Encyclopaedia Book Collection, as each pound and a half instalment of the brown and cream faux leather-bound encyclopaedia was delivered to the Fairbairn family’s The Ridgeway View address. Often, he would trace the pictures with HB pencil onto large thin sheets of leftover white butcher’s paper.
Copies of the local newspaper were quite frequently also deposited in his lap once his father had finished reading them. He was even given a high school copy of the textbook Biological Science: The Disturbing Web of Life by Kenny one day. Salvaged from the Mission Australia charity bin adjacent to the Anglican Church, naturally enough. Kenny had already torn out the full colour pictures of human reproductive organs. Whether this was for Eugene’s protection or Kenny’s self-gratification, he never found out. Nor did he really want to. Although, had he seen them, he would have valued their inspiration for drawing the human figure.
At school, Kenny developed valuable, entrepreneurial alliances because of his physical presence. At home, Eugene developed his smug sense of superiority.
Mother.
Well, Mother—it had to be said—was profoundly inferior due to her folded flabs of powdery flesh and ever-willing (if not desperately cloying) need to please. Hers was a vast repertoire of adipose tissue and softened will. She was huge and no longer a lissom shoat. Eugene tried to sketch her once but was filled with a choking wet, guilty loathing.
Father.
His father was profoundly inferior on account of his deformed back. His scoliotic back. His hunchback. He was a not-so-distant cousin to the Elephant Man, many thought. Eugene’s sketches of him always turned into cruel cartoons.
So much of intellectual Eugene seemed to not really belong to his barnyard family of animals. Not really, really belong, that is. A little part of him knew it was wrong, but he hated nearly everyone he came in contact with, and most of all his family. They knew way too much and yet also not enough about each other. But they had their uses. People outside his family served simply to thwart Eugene’s intentions, and exasperate his plans, and foil his endeavours, and to even make his goals seem foolish and capricious. Never could they understand his burning need to express some unique fact, some never-before-expressed thing. When he could do that he would have mastered the art of existing. Then could he say: “I am Eugene Fairbairn, I am a Somebody!”
Mother, Father and most undoubtedly Kenny, were nonentities compared to the Somebody he would one day be acknowledged as. By the world. The world beyond The Ridgeway View. The world beyond Queanbeyan and Canberra. Yes, the world beyond Australia, too.
But finally Mother had gone too far.
“You must show us your paintings someday, Eugene. Show us what they’re all about.”
His paintings! Even when he did eventually graduate, like a scholar, from pen and ink, charcoal and graphite on paper to the exalted oils on canvas, he knew she, his own uneducated Mother, like Kenny, could never understand what they were ‘about’.
She had certainly gone too far.
In every other respect apart from his animality, Eugene would grudgingly admit, his father George Fairbairn was a handsome human. He had lips strong but rough—perhaps from too few lovers (in fact, just one, whom he married, with nary a shotgun in sight, his father would sometimes joke, almost as lamely as his gait). Most noticeably, though, Eugene’s father’s face was blessed with eyes of a vivid slate blue, or periwinkle blue, or sky blue—depending on the available light—and further blessed with a halo of golden grey hair which was so thick, if left to grow it would soon take on dimensions rivalling that hairdo of a pomaded rockabilly. Even with conservative barbering, his hair curled erect and quivering without ever breaking, a frosted wave of keratin, and Eugene always shrank from its virility whereas Kenny always grabbed thick wads of it with both fists, as if he could wrestle his father that way when no other way was physically safe. Even as a child, Kenny was prone to feeling cautious because of their father’s twisted back and his own outsized youthful musculature.
In addition to his handsome head of hair, Mr Fairbairn had an easy-going, engaging smile and many women could understand how these facial attributes alone permitted his once pretty wife to see beyond the crookedness of his posture.
The cautious Eugene was not so easily deceived, however, by the gratuities of bone structure and follicular genetics.
One late cloudy afternoon, in an otherwise un-noteworthy February, when Kenny was at rugby pre-season training and he was contagious with something or other, the measles or some alternatively common childhood illness, Eugene was leaning across the post and rail fence’s lowest rung in the late afternoon sunlight, trying hard not to scratch the lesions on his skin, when his father slowly alighted from the bus, about a hundred yards further along their own Boomerang Crescent.
His walk, which the nine-year-old Eugene studied objectively, clinically, from the shameless cover of distance, was an asymmetrical, crabwise shamble and would surely prompt the less generous of observers to wonder if the approaching man were actually inhuman. As Eugene himself so often ungenerously did. The man was awkwardly articulated and titters always rose from clumps of children when he passed them in the street, as smoothly as a three-wheeled shopping trolley might also pass them.
Eugene’s critique on that day was all the more severe for being so detached by the distance. A hundred yards is just far enough for intimacy to become impossible. However, as his father rocked his sideways body nearer, so that even the colour in the cheeks could then be discerned, the boy felt familiarity return warmly. But that was then dashed when the first words from the smiling, liquid mouth of his inhuman father as he approached the house were:
“Where’s Kenny?”
Such cruel words. Such treacherous words. Dishonoured, Eugene ran instantly to the dark protection of the garden shed and its earthen floor and corrugated iron walls with all the woodworking tools reliably in their stencilled places. Behind him his father’s uncomprehending laughter broke, like the call of a vindictive kookaburra, and then ricocheted in the velvet dark of the shed in the manner of stray verbal gunshots.
No further proof was necessary: Kenny was the favoured one. From that moment on, in Eugene’s mind, Kenny, the young gorilla of a brother, was often hated, sometimes tolerated, and all too rarely loved.
Although sometimes, just sometimes, Eugene forgot his envy and adored his big twin. At school, most often, when he, the smaller of the two playground primates, was cruelly taunted for his soaring intellect in the playground. Where the cold, hard concrete would too often collect him if they punched or just shoved. At those times, all his hopes would close down and he’d screw up his eyes in anticipation of the inevitable pain. But then—on the last day it ever happened—something else. Striding in fearlessly, his brother appeared and, windmill arms fists shoulders flying, punched two ape faces and knocked together those of the less academic heads. Saving Eugene’s … bacon.
“That’s my brother, Eugene!” Kenny boomed. “We’re twins!” and put his arm around Eugene’s thin, humiliated shoulders.
He repeated gently to his brother, in a loving whisper, “We’re twins.”
“I know, I know.” Eugene blubbered and gulped back snot as the bullies all scattered.
Johnny Cullen was surprisingly proud of the shiner Kenny had given him, and the Sixth Grader’s eye stayed black and bloodshot well into the next week.
Some thoughtful mentors of children will pontificate upon how schooling constructs sound character by chipping off the edges until they became smooth. But the removal of his edges by other boys revealed no diamond of character at Eugene’s core, only shapelessness, like an unintelligible sculpture in a modern art exhibit, and the constant mocking served no more function than to embitter him for the rest of his life. Without his big twin, he often felt helpless against such bullies, with their muscles, their speed and their bodily confidence.
But there was one time when the situation was unexpectedly reversed.
Towards the end of one April recess break Eugene wandered around to the school’s back playground, content in sucking the last remnant of artificial orange flavour from the hard white ice of his pyramid-shaped Sunnyboy frozen treat, and there was his brother, sat down upon his haunches, tears streaming, mucus stringing.
“They called me a … a … Aborigine, Eugene. ‘Cause of my curly hair and dark skin.”
Kenny had taken offence, though he could hardly have explained why. Perhaps it was simply because a verbal offence had been intended.
“Who did, Kenny? Who said that?” And his gentleness sounded like another boy’s voice and not even his. So genuine, indeed, were Eugene’s words, he might have been caring for and loving himself.
“Macca. And … and Jonesy.”
So Eugene found and assaulted the two, Macca and Jonesy, with his only truly frightening weapon, his well-chosen eloquence. When he had built up a head of righteous steam, Eugene could roar, no less like his brother, although more like a bull, rampaging in the ring:
“To boorish philistines of limited experience such as yourselves,” Eugene blasted mercilessly, “my brother and I may not fit your crudely measured racial profiling, but let me assure you morons both, we Fairbairn twins are of fine Anglo-Saxon stock, and the Fairbairn name is an historic and well-respected Scottish moniker. There is no Indigeneity in us whatsoever. Kenny is olive-skinned because he is forever out of doors, while his hair is curly because he rarely combs it when it is wet.”
Macca and Jonesy, who were both gingered redheads with skin so white it actually seemed blue at times, were both dumbstruck. For a young man-child, not yet shaving his cheeks or chin, this was quite a bravura speech from Eugene, if necessarily so, but then neither Macca nor Jonesy were big monkeys. From such small remonstrations do schoolyard reputations grow, however, and Eugene found his own expanding in the circuses of Queanbeyan East Primary School and then, after that, at Queanbeyan High School.
Although his brother helped with his devoted, breathless retelling. How Eugene had saved Kenny’s…bacon.
But Mother set the cat amongst the race pigeons when Kenny brought up the topic of what he’d been called at the dinner table that night, while Father struggled manfully to carve the gristle-streaked saddle of mutton.
She was wearing a sleeveless, rose on white, printed polyester frock from which bulged her voluminous triceps, yellow-brown and fat, like meatless sausages. Some days her girlish beauty seemed a blasphemy, so irreverent and unlikely a legend it was, despite the framed photographic evidence propped up there on the mantlepiece, alongside pictures of long-gone relatives, deceased relations who had ceased to matter anymore. To emphasise the blasphemy, her throat wattle dried and then knotted, as if she’d suddenly grown a goitre, but in a quick, decisive moment, she inhaled and exhaled and inhaled again deeply and began what really should have been begun years before.
“Actually, your great grandmother on my side was reputed to be an Aboriginal, a fine Pitjantjatjara woman. From the sandy deserts of inland South Australia.” She tried to sound confident but her actual nervousness, she could tell, meant her smile was devolving into a visible tic in her face.
“So you two lucky boys are what they call octoroons. One eighth Aboriginal. Not that anyone could ever tell by looking at you, but still. Your great grandmother. But we don’t really talk about her because your great grandfather, well, he never bothered to make an honest woman of her.”
She was laughing her embarrassed laugh by then, the tic in her cheek leaping about like a demented frog, and their mother decided to end the guilty little story right there and then. She feared that with all these confessions her nervous voice might soon sound like oinking.
Thankfully, her loose chamois leather throat began to recover as she served the mash and French beans, but astonishment had silenced Eugene. That Father should act as if it were all of no consequence further compounded his astonishment.
Did his father actually believe this? This travesty? Did he believe he had married himself a lousy gin, a treacherous boong? Or at least a part-boong? What if the boys at school learned of this? The abuse Eugene suffered would increase tenfold if they thought he really was part-Abo. Him! A coon! A nigger! And it’s not as if he could point a bone at them, like a Kadaitcha witch doctor, and turn them all into legless tadpoles! Outrageous! No matter what his mother said, HE, EUGENE FAIRBAIRN, WAS NOT AN ABORIGINAL!
Eugene was so affected he couldn’t eat. He pushed the grey meat around his plate to give the impression to his parents that he was. Some of it went into his mouth, but the beans had never tasted so metallic. Kenny, on the other hand, wolfed his filthy dinner down without hesitation, although it was obvious he too was munching now on new thoughts. And Eugene realised quite quickly that his twin was warming to the idea of having an Aboriginal bloodline. But at that point their mother’s suggestion was still being ruminated upon quite slowly, and Kenny masticated the notion along with the mutton gristle.
So, with the argument finally cracked open, like an egg revealing the slime-covered limbs of some monstrous inter-species hatchling, Eugene knew that with its cursed birth all inhibitions regarding the topic would soon be lost. The argument would fester, curdle and inevitably explode like a pus-filled pimple into an open feud.
They slept together that night, adolescent hog snout to hog snout, as they always did, but a damp fuse had been lit in the lives of the twins. With their mother’s tumultuous revelation now inside them, like a resident virus, a cure became an impossibility. And so Kenny set off the next day on his quest for Aboriginality, whereas for Eugene, who refused to believe it for even a moment, that watershed occasion was the catalyst from whence he first started seriously his sketches and drawings of people, which was his own quest for the truth in his identity. From such meagre, accidental fertilizing in the pig stalls and troughs of the Boomerang Crescent home on The Ridgeway View grew fatal fraternal division. The one was Indigenous, the other was not. And that is how the disparate Fairbairn brothers parted ways…and began to forever forsake the legacy of their twin births.
And provided their mother with the hurt she knew she deserved all along.