Boy In Between :: 2 A Good Little Brother
Lin is sixteen. Good with a gun, good with a sword. Kendo training sessions in the long shuttered dojo in the valleys with green fields. The countryside flashing by beautiful and strange from the windows of the car where he rides.
Sir Vicious sends him to an expensive luxury store with a credit card and a list. Look for pretty things, he says. Lin is confused. He stares at the glass windows, he does not truly know how one thing can be prettier than another, so pretty that you will not regret buying it above the others. A box of chocolates, a silk scarf, sunglasses, an antique straw umbrella with delicate, ancient kanji script expressing undying love, lettered around its edges. Pretty girls walk around the store, and Lin sees the men who follow them, burdened with pretty things, like him, except that he has no pretty girl to walk behind. The things he carries are for someone else's love. Lin watches the movements of the other people, walks out of the store, into the car. Shin grins at him in the rear-view mirror.
In the evening, Spike hands Lin a credit card, too. They are stepping out for a night of fun, the shopping malls closed, the bars and pubs and clubs wide open, roaring with light and music. Lin's head hurts, his ears and bones pound with the bass beats. Black speakers six feet hight set into the wall of the disco. Spike speaks, but he cannot be heard. Lin shakes his head and they walk to the bathroom. In one of the cubicles a man is throwing up. They wait for him to stagger out.
"What did Vicious send you to buy?" Spike asks.
Lin tells him. Sweets, scarves, pretty things for a pretty lady... He feels the card hard and thin in his hand, Spike pressing it into his palm, Spike's smile lopsided and a little sad.
"Do me a favour, will you?"
Lin pushes the card deep into his pocket. He wants to get out of here. He thinks about the cool air of the countryside, the peace of the skyline out of Red Dragon's glass windows. The girls in the disco frighten him, their lips and hair dyed saturated candy-colours, cheekbones and eyes and curves so perfect you can trace with your eyes where the surgeon's knife must have cut. Perhaps it is girls, he thinks. But he does not find the boys any more appealing, either. He cannot think of anyone he will feel for so strongly, the way Spike feels for his pretty lady. Lin fingers the card. Whose pretty lady is she? Can she belong to both big brother Spike and honoured master Vicious?
"Sir Vicious will not be angry?"
"Not if you don't tell him."
Spike grins. Lin remembers him that way.
"Then I will not disappoint you."
"Thanks. You are a great little brother."
Spike walks to the door, and before he opens it, while there is still a small kind of silence that the loud music cannot invade, he says, "Get something for your own girl if you want."
Left to stare at the door, his ears hurting, Lin feels the thin edge of the card in his pocket. When he goes out he sees the neon hearts dangling from the ceiling. Valentine's Day. Give your heart to someone. Lin feels lost, again; his heart belongs to himself, and there is no one he wants to give it to.
When he goes back to the store the next day, he sees her there, yellow-haired and pale, the spikes of her boot-heels sharp and terrible. She knows who he is; she walks alone, and after a while she comes across to where he is standing by a coat-rack, holding a black fur coat awkwardly in his hand.
"Miss Julia," he says.
"Hello, Lin. What are you buying?"
Lin shrugs ang puts the coat back on the rack. Lin has a sharp sense of smell, so perhaps he is not dreaming when he smells the cologne of big brother Spike, faded and mixed with the perfume in her hair. He looks over her shoulder, but she is truly alone. She takes his arm and they walk down the rows of coats, his limbs stiff, trying to move smoothly but failing because there is another human arm linked in his. Lin does not know why she has suddenly come up to him this way. Perhaps she is afraid someone is after her, perhaps she thinks if she walks with him, they will see him, they will be afraid. His pride, the red flame of dragon-breath, flares up, and his cheeks flush with it. Julia looks at him, smiles. Her eyes are always sad.
"What are you thinking of?" she asks.
"Nothing."
"Are you shopping here?"
"Yes."
Julia lifts her head, looks at the perfume counters and cosmetics stations, the racks of expensive dresses, the neon hearts everywhere; Julia makes an assumption. Lin knows this. He tries to stop her from peeking into the bag he carries, but she has seen the roses inside it, crystal roses fresh forever, packed for safety inside a padded box. Now she smiles, and she is not sad; she is happy for him. He does not want to tell her that she is wrong. He has never seen her happy before.
"For a special person, isn't it?" she asks. "What a lucky girl she is, to have a sweet boy like you. But you must be careful, Lin; you must remember that you do not own people, no matter how much you love them. If she wants to go, let her go. And if you want to go, she must let you go, too. You know what I mean, don't you? That you can find someone, and think that this is the person I will spend my life with; and then you meet someone else, and you realise you were wrong..."
Lin is afraid that she is going to start crying here, her thin arm still wound around his; he simply shrugs, and turns his head away.
"I have to go," he says.
"I wish I had a little brother," Julia says; perhaps she has not heard him. "You make a good little brother, Lin."
She kisses him on the cheek, and leaves. The coolness of her lips lingers on his face, as does the smell of perfume, the brief cigarette-smoke and cologne-drift that forever lingers around Spike.
Lin remembers this, when he stands at the door of Julia's house with his gun cold under his coat, his fingers on the handle, Shin on the other side of the door and their eyes sharp in the darkness; when he hears the voices of Sir Vicious and Julia through the door, he also hears her sadness, feels the kiss like a single tear on his cheek. He wipes the side of his face with the back of his hand. Shin is bored; yawns, still alert, but bored.
"Valentine's Day," he says, mocking. Shin had a girlfriend for a month. She liked having a boyfriend from a clan, a gangster-boy to drive the rest of the school into a jealous, envious fury when he leaned against the wire fence of the school field and kissed her through it, handsome in his long dark coat and shades. When she realised that he actually did kill people for a living she became frightened and stopped sneaking out to date him; he, in turn, stopped going to see her. Let her go. Lin thinks about what Julia said, about letting go. He does not think Sir Vicious would be like Shin. Sir Vicious would never let go. What about Spike? Would Spike let go, so that there would be peace?
Lin is sixteen. His head aches when he thinks about the workings of the world, about the pretty lady who makes two of his greatest role models act so strangely. He tries not to think too much. He cannot let Spike give the crystal roses to Julia now; she has seen them, she will think that they are from him, not from Spike, and there will be more confusion. He has plucked a hard petal off one of the roses, dropped it into the front pocket of his shirt.