The Family Law by Benjamin Law Page B

compelled her to scream in guttural, animal rage before throwing a frying pan at Andrew with such force that it left her bent over and heaving.
    The problem was, when it came to Andrew and me, hate didn’t even begin to describe it. Andrew, three years older than me, was the sibling who’d once crept up behind me in the kitchen and pinioned my arms before flashing out a large knife – the giant one usually reserved for bones and root vegetables – and whispering in my ear, ‘Don’t struggle, Ben, just stay still.’ With that, he ran the blade across the soft fleshy underside of my forearm, the part used for suicide. When I finally found my voice, I emitted high-pitched wails, like a scandalised eunuch. Then Andrew slapped me on the back of my head and laughed. ‘Dickhead, it’s just the back of the knife!’ he scoffed, before showing me my unmarked arm. By the time my sisters arrived to find out who’d died, I’d collapsed on the floor, shaking, holding my arm to stop the imaginary blood loss.
    Another of Andrew’s favourite pastimes was to pin my arms down with his legs, cover my mouth with his hand and tickle me while I spasmed underneath him in pain, crying silently. My gulping, fish-like convulsions reminded me of an incident in a telemovie we’d seen. Set in an all-women’s prison, it followed a new blonde inmate who had been wrongly convicted of murder. On her first day inside, the Bambi-eyed prisoner was cornered by butch lesbians, who massaged their knuckles before pinning her down and covering her mouth. The blonde prisoner’s eyes widened in horror, but there was no way to scream: she was well and truly muffled. My siblings and I had watched what followed, covering our eyes with cushions and screaming for her as she squirmed and kicked. So , I’d think as Andrew held me down and tickled my sides, this is what it’s like to be raped .
    â€˜Oh, don’t be so dramatic,’ Mum would say later in the kitchen. ‘He only does that because he loves you.’ But we all knew Andrew was dangerous. After all, he had worked his way through the siblings, almost methodically, and permanently scarred each one of us. Candy had a pockmark on her face where Andrew had gleefully ripped off a pus-filled chicken-pox welt, Tammy’s arm was missing a patch of skin because of a biking accident, and I sported a perfect triangle of missing flesh on my ankle, from the time Andrew had dragged me along the road on my tricycle, attached to his big-wheel with an occy strap. When Michelle was born, my sisters and I conspired to protect our infant sibling from the same fate, but we knew we couldn’t do much. The best we could hope for was that she wouldn’t lose something she really needed – an eye, say, or an adult molar.
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    It was perverse that out of all the siblings, Andrew and I were forced to shared a room. I never understood why boys and girls were automatically housed together. Andrew and I might have both been male, but of the five children, we were the least alike. Andrew was sporty, and won tennis and karate tournaments; I couldn’t throw a ball. While I adorned my side of the room with a giant plush-animal collection, Andrew blu-tacked his walls with photos of big-titted bitches. Andrew towered over his classmates, while I was the weedy kid who had to crawl on his hands and knees to board the bus.
    We couldn’t fit bunk beds in our room, so Andrew constantly rearranged our two single beds to create the illusion of space. One month our beds would shoulder each other in an L-shape; the next, Andrew would push them side by side, separating them with a long, sausage-like cushion we all referred to as the dai goo-goo , which translates as ‘large penis.’ All this constant moving and rearranging, all this desperate shuffling back and forth: it was the behaviour of captive animals in tight confines.
    The only space