five
When Stroma was smaller, she used to try to see round the corners of things. Every time somebody read her Babar the Elephant she’d stop at the page where his mother gets killed and tie herself in knots for a look at the face of the hunter who shot her. I never told her that you can’t see all the way round on a flat piece of paper, but she must have found out somehow because she stopped looking.
I reminded myself of Stroma, holed up in Bee’s bathroom, searching Jack’s photo for things that weren’t there. His eyes were pale and glassy, the irises ringed with black, the pupils like pinpricks. They looked like mirrors in the grey of the print. I thought I might see something reflected in them, the way you see things in the back of a spoon or in someone else’s sunglasses, but there was nothing there of any use, only the shadow of my own face peering into the shine of the paper.
Bee’s dad got me out of there in the end because Sonny needed the loo and he really couldn’t wait any longer or things would get messy. Leaving the picture was like leaving a cinema on a sunny day. I didn’t know what to do with my eyes because they weren’t looking at Jack any more.
Stroma grabbed me in the corridor and talked at a million miles an hour about how she’d rolled out pastry and used special cutters and put only half a spoon of jam in each one and did I want to see them cooking, did I, did I? But I didn’t.
Bee gave me a glass of water and sat with me in the sitting room. She looked out of the window, hands in her lap, back dead straight, jaw held tight shut like she was forcing her teeth together. It must have been awkward for her.
I said, “Do you know who that is?” and she nodded.
I said, “How come? From pictures at school?” and she nodded again.
I guess she didn’t know what to say either.
I wouldn’t have listened if she had. Every sound was suddenly too loud for my ears and I couldn’t get my breathing right and I had this overwhelming need to be on my own in the dark, seeing and hearing nothing.
Sonny came into the room with jam all over his hands and his face and his T-shirt. He started to use me like a climbing frame, like I was just more furniture.
“Sorry,” Bee said, and she picked him up by his waist and twirled him around and kissed the jam on his nose. “Go and find Papa.”
I was numb all over.
I left the negative behind and I took Jack home in an envelope. Mum was in bed and if she heard us coming in, she didn’t show it. I opened a tin of soup for Stroma and skipped the bath and read her the shortest book I could find. I promised I’d ask Mum to go and kiss her if she got up. Then I took my brother to my room, sat against the door so no one would get in, and I looked and I looked and I looked.
I’ve thought about it a lot, how much Jack changed in the time after he died. Don’t ask me how, but he wasn’t himself any more.
So what if you couldn’t move for school photos and team photos and brushed hair and smiling? None of them were the real him. Jack would never have let Mum get those photos out to show people. He’d have burned them if he could. They had fights over it. And his room was the same, but totally different, like a stage set of itself, like a piece in a museum, a fake boy’s room. I don’t think I ever saw his bed made when he was alive. He let plates and cups collect and fester on his desk for weeks. He stashed food under the bed and he smoked out of the window, even when the wind blew it straight back in so everything smelled of weed and old bananas and his socks, not air freshener and dust and the stopping of time.
When I think of people like Kurt Cobain or River Phoenix or Marilyn Monroe, it seems the most famous thing they ever did was die young. They stopped being real people who took drugs or told lies or went to the loo or whatever. They became saints and geniuses overnight. They became whoever anybody wanted them to be.
It was the same with Jack. He was a saint. We were just the living.
I pictured Mum lying in her room, all absence and silence and skin and bone. This boy she was grieving for, this perfect boy who made her life worth living, who made her forget she had other kids to love – who was he exactly? She loved him and everything, obviously, but I don’t recall her worshipping him like that when he was alive. I remember her calling him a little shit and grounding him for borrowing out of her purse. I remember her yelling at him to get up in the morning and stop peeing in the houseplants.
Even Jack would look bad if you compared him to his dead self. It was as if by losing him, she got him back, the son she wanted, the one she imagined having, before Jack was born and his personality got in the way.
Looking at that picture I realised there was something about it that was different to all the other ones plastering the house. His hair didn’t look combed or over-shiny. It looked thick and dark and messy, like every day. His skin looked like you could reach out and touch it. It was so detailed, the chicken pox scar on his brow bone, the flush on his cheeks, the way a smile could change his face completely if he meant it. There was a brightness about him. He was happy, not acting that way in front of a cheesy backdrop.
It was off duty. It was real. It was the person I was missing.
It was the Jackest picture of Jack I’d ever seen.
There’s no need to go through all the ways I tried to make sense of my own brother’s face showing up like that. None of them worked anyway. A stranger had given me something I’d never seen before that turned out to be mine. How was I supposed to feel? How could it be mine if I’d never seen it?
If I had no idea something existed, how could I manage to drop it? I checked the lining of my coat, the insides of my bag, the pockets of everything, and I didn’t find anything else I’d never seen before.
And this boy who gave it to me. I tried to remember what he looked like. Dark hair, dark eyes, I had a few details, but I couldn’t see him clearly. I wasn’t even sure I’d recognise him again. Did he know what he was doing or was it a coincidence? Which of those was worse?
I’m not a fan of coincidence and fate and all that. It makes me feel like there’s no point doing anything if you can’t change things, if you can’t be even a tiny bit in charge. Plus I realised that if there was coincidence, there was also anti-coincidence, the thing that only just never happens by the skin of its teeth, and because you’re not expecting it, you have no idea that it almost did.
Everywhere I went, I pictured him just leaving, disappearing round a corner or about to arrive, but only when I’d gone. It wasn’t a good feeling. It tied me up like a ball of string in a cartoon.
I didn’t show anyone else in my family the picture, not Mum or Dad or Stroma. I kept it to myself, hid it in the dark far corner underneath my bed where I could reach for it at night and where nobody else ever bothered to go. It had found me so it was mine. That’s what I figured.
Every so often, Mum had to go to the doctor to prove she was taking her medicine and not selling it on the black market. She must have cost the NHS a pile of money with all the pills she was on so they probably needed to make sure she was worth it. I swear she had the wrong prescription because
