the wall.
Jack put his arm around her and said, “Come and look at this, Mum.” He stood her in front of the wardrobe, stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders. He was already way taller than her then. When he opened the doors, everything tumbled out like clothing lava. I think there was fruit peel and crisp packets in there too.
Mum sort of bellowed and made fists and screwed her eyes tight shut, and there was this quiet pause where I thought she was going to properly start. But Jack said, “No! No, that wasn’t it, that’s not what I wanted to show you, honest,” and he was laughing and refusing to let her get angry around him. I was so close to that place where laughing is bad and it’s impossible not to. I couldn’t look at him.
He pointed to the map and said, “This is the KNOWN UNIVERSE,” in a rumbling, half-serious voice like that man who does all the movie trailers.
Mum was still holding the laundry. She rolled her eyes and started to speak, but Jack stopped her. He had the broken aerial of his radio in his hand and he was using it to point at the map like a teacher, like a weather man.
“This tiny dot,” he said, “is PLANET EARTH. And that lives in this cylinder here, which is our SOLAR SYSTEM. That’s the sun and all the planets, right? You knew that.”
Mum’s foot was tapping, double-time, like, “Let’s get this over with”.
“Now this cylinder, our solar system, with the sun and the planets and everything, is this tiny dot in this cylinder which is the NEIGHBOUR GROUP.” He paused for effect, like he was looking at a class of scientists.
“And the neighbour group is now this tiny dot in this next cylinder which is a SUPER CLUSTER. Are you getting this?”
There were five or six cylinders altogether and the last one was the KNOWN UNIVERSE.
“The KNOWN UNIVERSE’ he said to her over and over again. “THE KNOWN.”
Mum said, “What does this have to do with anything?”
“Well,” Jack said with his hands outstretched and this “love me” look on his face. “How important is a tidy room now, in the scheme of things? Where does it register on the map?”
Mum laughed then and so could we. Jack gave her this big bear hug and she said he was far too smart for his own good. She threw his clean clothes on top of everything else on the floor.
And she said, “You still have to tidy up.”
Like I said. One of those people who make a room more interesting when they’re in it.
I’m not saying Jack’s perfect. I’m not pretending he hasn’t wound me up or kicked me too hard or made me eat mud and stuff like that, because of course he has. Maybe all brothers do. It’s just that he also looked after me and made me laugh and told me I was cool and taught me things nobody else but your big brother can.
So I miss him.
We all miss him.
We’ve been missing him for more than two years now. And it’s never going to end.
Bee would have been in Jack’s year. I knew her face, but I’d never spoken to her. She came from somewhere else about a year after he died. I knew nothing about her. The only reason I noticed her that day in the lunch hall was that she was looking at me.
At first I thought she was doing it by accident – that staring-into-space thing where you wake up and realise you’ve been looking straight at someone and they’re wondering why. She was watching me and I was waiting for her to snap out of it, but she didn’t. Instead she walked right up to me like I was on my own, and she smiled and looked around and said hello, and then she said, “What was it?” Like that, out of nowhere.
I said, “What was what?” because I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.
Bee said, “The thing he gave you. What did he give you?” I said, “Who?”
And she said, “The boy in the shop.”
I asked her how she knew about it and she said she was behind us all in the queue. I tried to picture the people staring at me in the shop that day, but Bee wasn’t one of them.
It was days since then.
“I was there,” she said. “I saw the whole thing. He was cute. What was it – his phone number?”
I laughed a bit louder than everyone else and said, “No way, as if,” and looked at my shoes.
Bee said I’d put up quite a fight and I said, “Well, it wasn’t mine.”
She said, “What wasn’t yours?”
I wasn’t sure if I still had the negative on me. I had to dig around in my bag for a while before I found it. She held it up to the strip lighting, this bedraggled little opposite of a picture.
We were quiet for a minute, then Bee said, “Who is it?” and I said, “I don’t know.”
She said, “Do you think it’s a man or a woman?” but I couldn’t tell.
She said, “What a weird thing to get given.”
I said that was why I’d tried not to take it, because it was obviously a mistake.
“Maybe he saw you drop it,” Bee said. But he didn’t, because I didn’t, and I said so.
She asked me why somebody would make up something like that, what the point would be, and I thought about the boy smiling, about how many people there are out there that you don’t know the first thing about. “Takes all sorts,” I said, and I held out my hand for it back.
Bee gave it to me and I put it inside a book to smooth out some of the creases.
She asked me what I was going to do with it and I said I hadn’t thought. And then the bell went and seven hundred and fifty people started moving for the doors all at once, including Bee, back the way she’d come, without saying goodbye, like our conversation never happened.
Our house was still a shrine then. Jack was everywhere, smiling out of rooms, watching on the stairs, aged nine and eleven and fourteen, his hair combed and parted, his ears sticking out, grown-up teeth in a kid’s mouth. Mum talked to the pictures when she thought she was alone. I heard her. Like one side of an ordinary phone call, like he wasn’t dead at all, just moved out and on the other end of the line. The kind of phone call he’d have probably got from her every week the whole of his life. You’d think death could have spared him that.
I never knew what she found to talk about. I was right there and she hardly spoke to me.
Home was quiet like a shrine too. Like the inside of a church, all hushed tones and low lighting and grave faces. There wasn’t any Jack noise any more. No loud music, no shouting, no playing the drums on the kitchen table at breakfast, no nothing.
My
