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watched. Finally they stopped, remaining locked together, almost statue-like. Then she unbent herself, bobbed her knees in a little curtsey, and reached between her legs with two fingers.
    â€˜You,’ she said, grinning delightedly, jabbing her fingers at his chest, ‘are going to get me pregnant.’
    He shushed her and automatically she looked around, scoping the street. Then she looked up – and saw me. I jerked back but didn’t dare release the blinds. After an appalling hesitation, she lowered her gaze, then straightened her clothes. She took possession of her suitcase handle. My brother stood there half-slouched and stupid. I ignored him. I watched instead the new self-consciousness in Baby’s body – or did I imagine it? – as she walked away, leaning her weight forward, scraping and sledding her suitcase across the street.
    â€˜I never want to see you again,’ my brother abruptly shouted into the night. ‘Take your stuff and get out of here!’
    With a wicked smile she turned in our direction. ‘I’m never coming back!’ she called out. She heaved the suitcase into the boot and slammed it shut.
    Something occurs to me from my childhood I haven’t thought about for years. After a particularly nasty beating, if I swore to tell our parents – and his bribes and proofs of contrition weren’t enough to dissuade me – my brother would threaten to run away. How strange that I now remember this with something like nostalgia. He would stalk to the closet and take out a suitcase and then he’d start packing it, leaving me mute-stricken as I tagged helplessly and furiously behind him, horrified by the thought of being responsible for his loss – and, far more deeply, of losing him. I’d break, of course, and agree to anything if only he agreed to stay. Was this what it was to love somebody? I guessed it had to be.
    A few weeks after my brother’s open-air tryst with Baby, we received word that the Ngo brothers had been ambushed at the casino. The crew from that nightclub fight was responsible; they’d driven all the way in, we later learned, from Sunshine. The youngest Ngo, Peter, had had two of his ribs broken with a cricket bat. They’d been out with the Footscray crew from the same fight – the one with Baby’s red-capped ex – with whom they’d since become mates. Straight away there was talk of revenge, and soon enough there was another fight, at another Asian night, when Red Cap recognised one of the Sunshine boys. This time, knives were produced, and two people cut.
    To Thuan and me, none of this, in itself, seemed critical. These fights happened all the time without ever reaching the hospitals, let alone the courts or headlines. The Ngos were known hot-heads. And everyone accepted that the club scene was booby-trapped with grudges and grievances, blood ties and vendettas and bonds of blind loyalty. Asian nights had been banned in Sydney for exactly this reason. The shock of what followed in this case lay mostly in the speed and savagery of its escalation. Afterwards, there was a fair bit of carry-on about who could have done what, when, to whom, to excite such action – but I’ll confess that, as irrational and unfair as it may sound, and though it can’t really be said to have presaged anything, as soon as Baby looked up that cool night, and commanded my eye, and showed me how dangerous her desire was, how matter-of-fact her recklessness – I knew right then I could no longer be shocked by anything that touched her.
    For Thuan it was already too late. First, it emerged that she’d been in contact with Red Cap, her ex, all along – that in fact he was her on-again off-again dealer. I saw my brother’s face when he found out, felt the shock and deep retreat as though it were my own. He broke it off with her. She contacted me and pleaded her innocence. She was crying, and had never