Estrella, grown old now, with creases between her breasts when she pressed her hands together in the prayerful gesture of joy I remember so well, turned her head away from me and called to her husband, ‘That’s what I told them, didn’t I, Alan?’

He harrumphed like an old man. ‘That’s what you said, darling.’

I may be Bibby’s little brother, but I am now forty-six years old. I have been married and I have two boys, young men now. They live with their mother in the small town where she and I met and married and lived happily for the twelve years I worked in the mine. When the mine closed and I moved away, like the other men, to find work in Manila, my wife and I grew apart. When I went back to visit I would find her distant. Polite, always. Kind. But distant. When I tried to be a husband to her, she lay stiff and silent with her legs straight like a peg doll in the bed. I am nothing more to her now than the provider of money. And that is all right. We lost too many years. How can I expect love from her when she doesn’t even know how many teeth I have left in my mouth?

Estrella told me to come to Australia because I could earn a great deal of money. ‘Alan makes fifty thousand a year,’ she told me. ‘He has no trade, but he makes plenty of money with no trouble. It’s a good life here.’

She sponsored me to come and live in Melbourne. Her husband signed an agreement with the government, promising to support me if something happened and I couldn’t work.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ Estrella said. ‘You’ll find work straight away.’

How sure she has always been of everything. We believed whatever she told us when we were young. Even my mother obeyed her. Estrella called from Hong Kong, where she cleaned floors and cared for her employer’s huge empty apartment, and told my mother to send all the money she had. ‘I will make it double,’ Estrella told us. ‘My boss is a stockbroker here in Hong Kong. He knows the Hang Seng. Send me everything.’

She made us some money. But at what cost? When Estrella was a young woman, before she left for Hong Kong to work as a maid, my mother would boast about how pakipot she was, always playing hard to get. She was a shy and modest Filipina girl. When she came back from Hong Kong the first time, she was no longer a virgin. She never said a word, but we knew. She had to go back to Hong Kong because no one in our town would marry a girl who had been spoiled. For years she worked in Hong Kong as a maid until finally she met a tourist in a bar and they married. Mr and Mrs Alan Beasley.

I cannot say for certain what happened to Estrella in Hong Kong, but she changed. She learned the Chinese way of talking loudly and arguing. Now she nags me, her brother only newly arrived here. She wants to know every detail of my day. I am a man, not a child! When she nags me like this I feel like I don’t know her at all. She is no longer the loving sister I adored when I was a child.

In Manila, I worked for a man who owned seventeen gambling parlours. My employment began at dusk when the stink of the streets grew stronger and men and women began to hurry on their way, eager to get home. Only gamblers and drinkers stayed out late in the parts of town where my employer’s machines and tables could be found. I finished at dawn, exhausted, and slept till late afternoon, when I would wash and iron my clothes, clean my apartment, maybe meet a friend for coffee before work. A simple, hard-working life. I was not dissatisfied with my life in Manila, but I knew I could do better. And Estrella insisted that if Alan could make so much money, so could I. Then I arrived here and met the famous Alan, about whom I had heard so much. After our first meal together, Estrella sent Alan and me away from the kitchen. We settled side by side in front of the television, the stubbies of beer in our hands growing warm as we watched young men and women pose and cavort in front of the cameras. We barely spoke. I was shy. Alan was, I found out as we sat there night after night, being Alan.

Now, while Estrella is washing the dishes or tidying up after tea and Alan and I are planted in front of another program on gardening or current affairs, we pretend to chat. If I ask Alan a question, he answers the television. He never looks me in the face. Estrella says it is the way of Australian men. I think it is something else. It is only a month since I arrived and already my brother-in-law treats me like I am nothing. I wonder what Estrella has told him about me. Alan works for the council. When I ask him how his day was he waves his hands in the air and complains about the people he supervises. ‘I can’t get them to do anything,’ he says. ‘They’re lazy sods. Every report has mistakes. Half of them can’t put a sentence together. They’re always slipping out of the building for a fag and not coming back for twenty minutes.’

Alan is balding and has a small paunch that rests comfortably above the belt of his dark grey suit. As soon as he arrives home from work he hurries to the bedroom, then reappears in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. Estrella brings stubbies to the back verandah where we sit on green plastic chairs until tea-time, watching the magpies and blackbirds hopping around in the garden. Three days ago, as we sat on the verandah in the chilly autumn air, Alan told Estrella that he would be getting a pay rise next month, an extra eight dollars each week.

‘A promotion!’ she cried. She jumped out of her plastic chair so quickly it tipped back and bounced along the verandah, and rushed over and hugged Alan. He tilted his head back and she kissed him on the lips. To my horror, her tongue slipped into his mouth. I turned my head away, feeling nauseous, imagining the mingling of their beery spit. I wondered if Alan was cupping her breast again, as he had done another evening when Estrella leaned over the table to pick up his dirty plate.

Eventually they pulled apart. Alan patted Estrella’s large bottom, encased in one of her colourful skirts, and she picked up her chair and sat down again. ‘Sorry, mate,’ Alan said to me. He stretched his hand across and rested it on Estrella’s knee. ‘We’ve got to respect your brother’s feelings, sweetie. You know he doesn’t like us having a cuddle in front of him.’

‘Sabali nga ili, sabali nga ugali,’ Estrella muttered to me before she lifted her glass of beer to her mouth.

Estrella always liked to spout proverbs at us when we were young. As the oldest child of a fatherless family, she thought she had to educate us. Now I am a forty-six-year-old man and she is still trying to mould me. She doesn’t need to tell me that people of different countries have different customs. I know that perfectly well. But it doesn’t mean we have to demean ourselves by behaving like them. Sexual relations between a man and his wife should be a private thing.

My mother told me many times when I was growing up that I must respect a woman’s purity and innocence. She taught my sisters to be shy and modest. On the streets of Manila I knew plenty of women to whom modesty meant nothing. They made their money with their bodies. Now here was my oldest sister, flaunting herself like one of them.

Once Estrella had sat down, Alan gave her the bad news. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, Stell, but it’s not a promotion. It’s just an indexed pay rise from the last negotiation.’

So this man, this weak man who watches his employees wander away when they should be working will get a pay rise. I saw this in Manila as well: men earning more and more money in their jobs for no reason, drifting higher and higher, like untethered balloons.

Always I come back to the balloons. They haunt me, still there in the lounge room, sticky with smoke from the fire made with green spring wood and floating on the bad breath of the three of us watching television night after night.

Every time I look up at their bald wrinkly heads like old men stuck to the ceiling, I think of Alan. It is difficult for me to believe he is only four years older than me. Like so many of the men I have met here, he is strangely soft. Not in his body, but in his manner. Always apologising. Always snuffling and coughing like an old man with catarrh. Always sitting.

Tonight we are not watching television together. I am here alone in the lounge room, staring at the multicoloured balloon heads on the ceiling. Estrella and Alan have gone to the movies to see a romantic comedy, like teenagers on a date. I think their problem is that they have no children. Estrella had almost given up on finding a man before she met Alan in the bar in Hong Kong. She had written to me and my sisters that she would continue to work as a maid and send us money as long as her body held out, but that she was getting older. She said that the change had happened which meant she could no longer have children.

I asked my other sisters what she meant and they told me that in our family the women’s childbearing years end early. My sisters wept for Estrella that she would never feel the love for a baby of her own. I told them to stop their crying. ‘Haven’t we produced enough children for one family?’ I said to them. With eleven children between us, we should be happy that Estrella has only our children to spend her money on.

I have been working since the second week I arrived at my sister’s house. My first position was at a local bakery, where I rose at two in the morning to bake the bread. I walked to work through dark streets where cats and dogs sniffed the damp grass, and garbage trucks screeched and clanked along the kerb. The smell of bread in the clean morning air was good, but the pay was poor. I complained to Estrella because she had told me that her husband earned fifty thousand dollars per year and my salary was only thirty thousand. She said I would have to wait a little while before earning more money.

I knew she was wrong. That day I took the train to the centre of the city and looked for the people I knew could use my skills. In Manila I had worked for a man who needed a helper with a level head. In Melbourne such men were easy to find. Most businesses can use someone to explain to their clients why they must pay their bills. It is all a matter of attitude, and I am composed and persuasive. If the clients do not understand my message, other people are sent who can persuade with more than words.

Estrella never asked why I stopped getting up at two in the morning. Two weeks later, I handed her my board money and she looked at the notes lying in her hand. ‘This is too much, Rico,’ she said. ‘We agreed one hundred dollars a week, so you can save for your own house and bring your boys out here.’

‘I am earning more than your husband now,’ I told her. ‘Keep the money.’

Estrella shook her head. ‘You think this is a competition?’ she asked. She rubbed her eyes with her fists. Mascara fell from her lashes and settled on her cheeks. ‘So what are you doing that you can earn so much money so fast?’

‘I looked up my old friend from Manila,’ I told her, a little white lie but close to the truth. ‘I am helping him with his business.’          

‘And what’s his business?’

I was giving her the money, more than she had asked for. But was she grateful? Not Estrella.

‘His business is none of your business.’

‘Of course it is my business. We are your visa sponsors! I refused to have that conversation. I knew Estrella was trying to make me feel guilty, to bring me back under her thumb, like when I was a boy and used to hang on to her dress so she couldn’t get away from me. I shrugged and turned away.

‘Don’t ignore me!’ she shouted.

Just like the old Estrella. I was sure she would start begging, like our mother. First the shouting, then the begging. Hysterical female behaviour over nothing.            

I was surprised when I felt her tap my shoulder. ‘I thought you had changed,’ she said, her voice back to normal. ‘I know you have,’ I said. It is not only Estrella. The way women behave has changed, I know that. Changed her more than I can understand. And I know I am supposed to change too, as a man. But why should I change? Why do things have to change and change?

‘You must tell me where you are working, Enrico. It is for the government. We have to know.’ I started to walk away but she grabbed my shirt sleeve. ‘Please, Rico. Tell me.’

I shook my arm, but she was holding on too tightly. She began to cry and I told her to stop her stupid crying. ‘I don’t want you here,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be your older sister anymore. I am tired of this.’

I told her I would find a place of my own next week. I told her she was a stain on the family. First she brings me here, then she throws me out. What kind of sister would do such a thing?

She reached up and patted both my cheeks, as if I was a child. She patted them with more strength than I expected. ‘Always, Rico, always everything was for you, the boy.’ She patted me again, harder. My cheeks began to tingle. ‘All the money I sent home from Hong Kong, all the toys and the food and the nice clothes. All for you. The special boy.’ She was not patting now. Her slaps stung my cheeks. ‘Your other sisters cleaning and sewing and working. All for you. And you do nothing except for yourself.’

‘What do you mean? Didn’t I go to work in the filthy Manila slums for my wife and children?’

She opened her mouth, then she closed it again without saying anything.

Now I sit here alone, looking at the withered Alan-head balloons on the ceiling, the sound of fake laughter coming from the television, and wonder whether I should stay in this country or go home. I think of Estrella and Alan at the cinema, him pawing her like she is a prostitute. I think of my wife, who asked me last year not to visit anymore, as if I am an annoying salesman rather than the father of her children. I think of that time long ago when Estrella was first in Hong Kong and I was allowed to talk to her on the telephone. I held the handset away from my ear, afraid that her voice would travel inside my head and get stuck there.

‘Are you being a good little boy for Bibby?’ she asked me, her voice tinny and distant.

Being good was simple then. I listened to my mother. I did my chores. I knew my place and what was expected of me.         

So I told Estrella I was a good boy and she said that was all she wanted to hear.