usually cold and I could never lock my door.
Jack’s room was on the same floor as Mum’s and Stroma’s, next to the bathroom. It had two windows and tall bookshelves and an old wooden desk. The walls were a warm grey colour called ‘Elephant’s Breath’. It was the saddest place in the house, the living, breathing mother ship of everybody’s grief. If you were thinking you were getting over Jack and things were nearly back to normal, you’d only have to go in that room and you’d start missing him from the beginning all over again.
Now and then that was just how I wanted to feel.
Sometimes I’d put on some of his music. Sometimes I’d pick up his guitar, but I can still only play the first six notes of Scarborough Fair so that never lasted long. I don’t even like that song. Usually I’d stretch out on his bed and look at the sky through his windows. That night I sat with my back against the wall and my chin on my knees and I turned the negative over and over between my fingers. I thought about what Bee had said, about what I was going to do next.
Nothing, I thought, and I aimed it into the bin from where I was sitting and went back to thinking about my brother.
I wasn’t sure if Stroma missed Jack, not really. She stuck him at the end of her prayers with Grandad Clark and Great Auntie Helen (who she’d met, like, twice) and the people on Newsround, but I reckoned she forgot him almost as soon as he was gone. She hardly ever saw him anyway; maybe at breakfast when he wasn’t really awake, or in the car when he’d have headphones on and act like she wasn’t there. Jack did loads of nice stuff with Stroma, like taking her to the park or teaching her how to make paper aeroplanes, but I think she was too young to remember. She didn’t know him at all. I wonder how she added it up for herself, this stranger in her family dying and turning her family into strangers.
It was me that had to tell Stroma because nobody else had done it. It was the morning after they told me. She had no idea Jack was dead. Everything around her was altered and she was trying so hard not to notice.
She looked up at me and said, “What’s the matter with Mummy?” and I said she was sad.
She asked me what Mum was sad about and I said, “Jack’s gone,” and Stroma carried on humming this little tune and pouring nothing out of a tiny china teapot. Then she said, “Where?” and I said I didn’t know. She picked up a cup and saucer and handed it to me. She said, “Blow on it, it’s really hot.”
I said, “He’s dead, Stroma. He’s never coming back.”
I could feel this weight, this downward pressure in my head, and I thought it was possible I could cave in or implode because I just said that out loud.
Stroma was quiet for a minute, and then she sighed and looked right at me and said, “Can I have something to eat now? I’m starving.”
And that was how it started, how I ended up looking after her.
I went into the kitchen to make some toast and there wasn’t any bread, not even a crumb. I knocked on the door of Mum’s room and got some money and I took Stroma with me to the shop. And all the time I was putting stuff into the basket and working out what we could afford, and saying no to marshmallows, but yes to chocolate biscuits, and planning what we’d have for supper and then breakfast. I didn’t have time to lose it. I didn’t have time to lie down in the corner shop and scream and beat the floor until my hands bled. I didn’t have time to miss Jack. Stroma carried on chattering away and getting excited over novelty spaghetti shapes and finding the joy in every little thing, and it occurred to me even then that she was probably looking after me too.
Believe it or not, school was one of my favourite places back then. Everywhere else seemed like hard work, so school was a distraction. I didn’t have to worry about where Stroma was. I didn’t have to handle Mum. I didn’t have to think about the obvious unless I wanted to.
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