My brother lives near you, in the caravan park by the Barwon River. He’s been there since he came back to Geelong from Queensland, devastated because the single mum he’d followed up there had taken to drinking even more than she had in Geelong, and had also taken to rooting blokes she met at the pub and asking my unlicensed brother to pick her up from their houses.

Not surprisingly, he thought it was time to catch a few busses home.

My folks loaned him some money so he could buy a caravan, a clapped-out Millard with a patched-up canvas annex attached. Before that, he’d been living in the shed of Mum and Dad’s retirement village unit in Grovedale. The village is tucked away at the end of a snaking cul-de-sac and, even more hidden from view, there lay my brother, wrapped in a sleeping bag on a blow-up mattress near Dad’s beer fridge. Living the dream, he told me on the phone –homeless at forty-four, no driver’s licence on account of two drink-driving convictions, and with three teen kids from two previous partners. A former gardener, he could only do odd jobs because he was on painkillers for his back, and on grog, ciggies and hooch for his life.

Not long after he got the van, he met a new woman and things seemed to be looking up. She was a walking beanbag with two toddlers and, given my brother’s last adventure, my alarm bells were chiming fast and metallic. She was renting an apartment in Geelong West but didn’t mind that my brother lived in a caravan park and that his only steady job was cleaning the toilets there to pay part of his rent. A nurse, she’d adopted two toddlers her former partner had left her with. One of them had autism and the government paid her to look after them. It was her main job, she said, and my brother was employed with her, looking after them whenever she went shopping, visited friends, got a shift at the hospital, or had dinner with her mother.

My brother quickly tired of cleaning up toddler shit and spew. It wasn’t worth the sex and company. He went on a five-day bender and didn’t contact his new girlfriend. She dumped him and he stayed in his caravan for a month, lifting the nylon blind each morning only to check the weather. It was always raining so he couldn’t go anywhere, even if he wanted to. In Melbourne, I checked the weather app for Geelong and it didn’t look like it was raining too much. I got a friend of mine to go around and knock on his door, see if he was alright. My brother answered in his undies. He was thin as a cricket bat. Still, he was alive.

A few years ago, my wife and I had followed my brother back to his house after he’d stormed from the Christmas dinner table, muttering something about how fucked it was that his uncle was there. When we got to my brother’s beat-up weatherboard, he said he’d been setting up an esky to stand on in his shed so he could reach the noose he’d hung up there.

Eventually, it stopped raining and he came out of his caravan. A few days later he found on a nature strip near your place a dinged-up bicycle with a ‘free’ sign on it. Its wheels and brakes worked fine, even if its gears didn’t. Still, they were stuck in fifth, so it wasn’t too hard for him to ride up hills. From your bay window you might have seen him on his way past sometimes – if you’d been looking for him. Even though it took him longer, my brother used your leafy Rosemary Avenue to get home from the bottle shop because it was all downhill and easier to ride one hand while carrying his case of Pure Blonde stubbies under his arm. He was working on his health now, and it seemed low-carb beer, fewer ciggies and no hooch was the way to go. He started drinking soy milk with his coffee.

I remember your place, the white stone walls and the ivy running up and down them. That cottage on your property, too. A gardener would have lived there back in the day. Maybe you turned it into a den for your teenagers. It’s a great house. I can’t remember how many bedrooms but I doubt there’d be any change out of five. I’d like to have kept up with you more after high school, but there was the land purchase scandal, which I know wasn’t all your dad’s fault, but he did pull you out of high school and send you off to Grammar for VCE on what was probably dirty money. That’s not your fault, either and neither’s your job. Well, it is, really. You don’t have to be a real estate agent.

You claimed innocence in the media about the new scandal your family was caught up in and I guess it will all come out someday. I was tempted to talk to Geelong journos about it, not because I wanted to report on it myself, but just to find out if there was more to your story than was in the papers. But I held off. Leave it to the courts, if it ever gets there.

That might be more complicated now.

I’m not saying you deserve what happened, that it’s somehow karma for what you and your family might have done, the millions you’re said to have stolen. But it’s not to say, either, that my brother will deserve jail if that’s where he ends up.

You and my brother could have lived miles apart, in different Geelong suburbs, and then your son would probably have never gone to Belmont’s High Street Bottle Shop. I don’t have to tell you he was too young to be there and already drunk, trying to score more grog. And far too young to be taking on my brother, with lip or fist.

There’ll be a thousand sides to the story. Video evidence, maybe, bystander evidence, probably. Your son’s mates’ evidence and my brother’s. My brother’s is all I’ve got to go on tonight and I don’t even know if my brother will end up on a witness stand. At the moment, I don’t know if he’ll end up in court. But here’s the thing: there’s no excuse for violence but there’s always a reason. And there’s no preventing bad luck.

Luck, fate, God, karma, reasons, excuses. None of it changes facts or death.

My brother’s facts, or at least as he told them to me after I’d driven over the speed limit from Melbourne to his caravan and put my face right into his in the yellow light from his lamp and made him tell me the whole story, which I added to his other whole story, brought me to this.

A set of facts that blow up our worlds.

My brother was outside the bottle shop; it was getting dark. He’d just bought his case of Pure Blonde and it sat on the concrete beside him because he was rigging his torch-meets-head lamp arrangement onto his bike. One of your son’s underage mates came up to him and, drunk, jokingly asked if he could have one of the Pure Blondes.

My brother was suspended from high school because, competing in the high dive at the swimming sports, he’d stopped at the end of the board, dropped his shorts, and flashed a brown eye to the whole school.

“Of course, mate,” my brother answered. He opened the top of the beer box, drew out a stubby and gave it to the kid. Then your son and his four other mates all wanted one too. My brother laughed and said, “Nah, that’s all I can spare, lads.” If he were richer, he’d have handed over more brews. If he were richer, he might not have needed so many cases of beer a week.

Your son and his mates couldn’t even get into the bottle shop because they were too drunk. But, safe in numbers, they followed my brother on their bikes once he took off, just to see what more they might get out of him.

Long after I moved from Geelong to Melbourne, my brother became a decent street fighter. He knocked out a few skinny wankers in the Geelong Hotel and Barwon Club, took teeth from already sparsely populated mouths. And he’d been able to handle himself since his first day in prep. I was in Grade Six and one of my mates called out that my brother was in a fight. I ran over expecting to see my other, Grade Three brother going at it, but it was my preppie brother – he’d just bopped a Grade Two on the nose and sent him crying to a teacher.

Your son and his mates caught up with my brother down near the river. They were still play acting and laughing, just asking for beers. My brother said he could give them one more. Which he did, on the path near the river in the wonky light from his bike torch. But it wasn’t enough. The lads wanted more. And I can’t tell you why my brother was wearing those shithouse grey track pants pulled up over his belly and I can see why your son might yell out and call him a pedo. It makes some kind of sense to me.

But it also made my brother say, What was that, kid?

My brother lives in a caravan. He’s barely ever been able to hold a job. He’s been violent for most of his adult life. Ask the bloke he followed to his house and belted after he cut my brother off in traffic. He’s been addicted to coke, hooch, ciggies, rooting, and grog. That day that he bailed from the Christmas table, he was thirty-three, and after he’d put his noose away he told me why it was he couldn’t cope with seeing my uncle having a good old Santa of a time. When my brother was at my grandparents’ for school holidays, my late grandfather and my uncle took him with them when they went outside to fetch long necks from the shed fridge and they all stayed out there too long. My brother was five, then seven, then nine.

Your son said, Called you a pedo, and all his mates laughed. He had an audience. And my brother knows he could have walked away. But he told your son to come closer and say it and he did. He then offered your son the first punch and, with his mates standing there, maybe your son felt like he couldn’t refuse or he’d look weak. And maybe he also thought, My mates are here and they’ll back me up. So he took his first punch and my brother stepped aside and clobbered your son with a right cross that sent him backwards and that would have been the end of it and they could have all gone home if his head hadn’t landed on the bitumen path.

You’re probably at the hospital now. That’s what I want to think but I reckon it’s more likely you’re at the morgue. And I’ve left my brother in his caravan. I know I should have taken him to the police but I left it with him to figure out if he was going to cycle down to the station. Maybe he will. He might go past your house on the way and you might be home by then and see him. He might also be on a train out of town. Or he might be still in his caravan, mulling over everything and crying like when I left him. Either way, you know what you know, he knows what he knows, and I’m heading back to Melbourne as soon as I can.