For Everyone Concerned by Damien Wilkins Read Free Book Online Page B

more than two years of following the system, my brother calculated that he had come out about even, or slightly worse in terms of money outlaid and money returned. It was not unusual for my brother to win up to a thousand dollars or more on one day and then to lose a corresponding amount the next. And that through these wild swings, he had come out after two years at about even, or slightly down.
    I remembered one evening of my second visit to Melbourne when my brother had showed me the logbook where all the numbers and calculations he used in his system were written. The instant my eyes had settled on the endless columns of figures which filled pages and pages of my brother’s book, I felt restless and anxious in the way that viewing any work of infinite patience always affects me. I remembered thinking in despair of the hundreds of hours which my brother must have wasted in writing these worthless marks on to the pages of his log book. I despaired of his weakness in submitting for more than two years to the endless routine of entering the numbers in their long, thin columns.
    Then, as my brother was speaking passionately about the system and its rigorous tracking of every possible variable in the running of a race, of the search for an equation adequate to all factors of environment, skill, past performance, whim, and chance, of the absolute impossibility of finding such an equation but of the endless tinkering and reformulating of existing systems in an effort towards completing exactly this hopeless task , I began to see the figures not as columns which bullied my brother but as the work of a careful, responsive hand which sought in the finest mathematical adjustments a sequence by which something might be finally guessed, and I saw in the arrangement of the numbers themselves, in the shape of their marks on the page, a kind of beauty, as if every evening for more than two years my brother had takencotton and a needle and painfully stitched the columns of figures through the pages of the log book.
    I then remembered what I had completely forgotten, that when my brother was a boy he had been interested in painting and had attended Art Classes and had, through the ages of twelve, thirteen and fourteen, filled many canvases. He had, of course, I now thought, done several passable imitations of the works of famous painters, propping up books which contained reproductions of these works beside his easel in the bedroom we shared as boys. In addition to these copies, my brother had, of course, produced his own paintings, two of which still hung on the walls of my parents’ house. I remembered also that when he was a boy he had wanted to become an architect, before, as a young man he had travelled to Melbourne and finished up where he was now, somehow, in a job which, he said, used no part of his brain .
    I had completely forgotten all of this, though whenever I visited my parents’ house, I looked at one painting in particular which my brother did as a boy of fourteen. It is a simple painting with very few things in it, just a tree in a field. But the field is a thickly applied gold-coloured crop of some sort—wheat or corn— which gleams in the foreground with a light which is almost too bright for the eye to settle on, so that one’s sight travels over this luminous field towards the brown-coloured tree which sits in the distance. Andoften my eye has travelled like this across the expanse of my brother’s burning field with joyful anticipation, as if it is very hot under the clear, pale blue sky and that there amongst the far-off dark branches I will find shade. It is seen as though from the wide, clear window of a passing train or vehicle and, indeed, my brother painted it from a photographic slide my father took from just such a travelling vantage point; through the windscreen of our family car while on holiday in Spain several months before our return from London to Wellington and my first visit to Melbourne aged