ALL THE UPSTAIRS lights were off now, but the kitchen light still spilt out from behind the hydrangeas, cutting a luminous path through the gloom. I stood in the dark under the apple trees and listened to the sound of Francis crying. It was the hoarse, choking, hopeless sound of someone who knows there’s nothing that can be done.
I had only heard someone cry like that once before, and that had been Dom – the real Dom. It had scared me then, and I had never heard crying like it since. Even when Grandda Joe died, even when Dad lost Grandad Peadar, the crying had been different. It had been done in the comfort of another person’s arms, with the knowledge that you were safe and protected and had nothing to be ashamed of. This? This was the lonely bitterness of guilt, and the understanding that you stood alone in a pitch-black world.
We were twelve, when I’d first heard that kind of crying; we’d been fishing with Dad and Grandda Joe. The two men had walked ahead, carrying most of the tackle and the picnic stuff back to the car. Dom and I were trudging silently along behind, our own rods bouncing on our shoulders. We were pleasantly shattered, content to put one foot in front of the other and nothing else. The tar sucked at our feet, and heat-devils made the road shimmy and waver against the air. It was baking hot. The tall brambles on either side of the winding country lane hung breathless and still.
We didn’t hear the car. The encroaching hedges and dead summer air conspired to flatten the sound, and it was on us before we knew it: a little pale-blue Ford Anglia with a lumpish shape at the wheel; here then gone in an explosion of sound and exhaust. The driver probably never even saw us, he was bombing along so fast. I shoved Dom one way and threw myself the other, and we ended up hung on the brambles like tinker’s washing, our rods slung across the branches of the hawthorn. We looked at each other across the haze of exhaust smoke, our mouths hanging open. Then I laughed, and Dom’s slow grin spread across his face, and we wordlessly peeled ourselves from the thorns.
The bird was in the middle of the road when we rounded the bend. It must have been hit by the car, or caught in its downdraft and slammed against the road. It was fluttering in an erratic circle on the hot tarmac, its movements too uncoordinated to even be an attempt at flight. My stomach turned over at the sight of its pained convulsions. Its gaping beak and emotionless, suffering eyes made my skin crawl in sympathy and revulsion.
I lay my rod down on the verge and went and hunched over the bird, my hands out, my intentions uncertain. It flopped and spasmed and gasped. My hands hovered over it. I couldn’t bear the thought of touching it – feeling its broken bones, perhaps, grating under my hands; its guts coming out, maybe; or something awful with its eyes. I could have picked it up easily, but I ended up just shuffling around after it, my hands poised but useless.
I was pushed gently to one side, and Dom hunkered down in my place. Unhesitatingly he put his hand down on top of the fluttering creature, holding her between the cup of his hand and the road. Her glossy head stuck out between the arch of his thumb and forefinger, the neck straining. Her bright-yellow beak was open unnaturally wide, the tongue poking far out. Her gold-rimmed eyes glittered. Dom took her head in his other hand, gently closing her beak within the grip of his fingers, then twisted his hands quickly in opposite directions, breaking her neck in one swift movement.
I straightened too quickly at the sight. The heat wrapped around me, and I twisted away, staggering off to dry-retch into the long grass beneath the brambles. It was cooler there, in the shade of the tall hedge, and I stayed crouched with my hands on my knees, waiting for my heart to slow down.
When I turned around, Dom was standing with the bird at his feet. He was looking at it, his arms hanging loosely at his side, his face blank. Then his chest jerked as if he was going to puke or hiccup, and he made a strange noise, and suddenly he was crying. His knees buckled just a little, and his head dropped back so that his mouth was opened wide, and he cried. It didn’t last long – a frightening thunderstorm, passing quickly in summer – but for its duration I remained scared and frozen, watching him as I’d watched that poor bird, too cowardly to do anything.
Here in this frostbitten garden, in the dark, the crying sounded just the same. The same desolation. The same loss. Francis leant to one side of the kitchen door, his back to the wall. I stepped from the cold shelter of the apple trees and stood opposite him. The rectangle of light from the kitchen was a golden border between us, and I could barely see him in the shadows. I watched, my jaw tightening, as he laid his head back against the bricks and let his grief consume him.
He had stolen my brother. He had pushed my brother out into the howling world of ghosts, and now he stood there bawling with the same sorrow that Dom had shown when he had taken that poor bird’s life. But you did this out of cowardice, I thought. Without mercy. You are not Dom. I felt my thoughts grey over. My hands balled into fists.
That day, when Dom had finally stopped crying, I had gone to him in a sudden rush of protectiveness and gratitude, and grabbed him. He’d been so surprised that he’d yelled. Then he had subsided into the hug, his arm twining around my waist. After a brief moment, he’d wiped his nose on the shoulder of my jumper and I’d pushed him off, swatting him in relieved disgust. We’d ignored the dead bird, retrieved our rods and continued on.
There would be no continuing on today, no hugs, and I didn’t wait ’til Francis had finished crying. Instead, I strode across the bright splash of light, my fists raised above my head, and slammed them down on the tops of his shoulders with a cry.
He grunted and fell to his knees, and I raised my arms again, bringing them down on his arched back in a double-fisted thump that vibrated up my arms to my teeth. He let himself fall to his side, wrapped his arms around his head and just went on crying. I brought my foot back in silent rage, fully intent on kicking him in the head. I’ve no doubt that kick could have killed him – I was mindless and blind – but, at the last minute, I stopped myself and punched him instead, hard on his back. The blow echoed hollowly in his chest and reverberated in my head. He did nothing, and some of the deafness of my rage faded as I realised he was still crying, huddled against the wall, heedless of my blows, weeping in long, groaning breaths as if nothing else existed but his grief.
I flung myself onto my knees and hauled him around to face me. I shook him furiously.
He didn’t even seem to register my violence. ‘I didn’t mean it,’ he whispered. ‘Oh, help me. Help me, God. I didn’t mean it.’
‘Yes, you did. You stole Dom’s body. You killed him. You killed him!’
His eyes opened with renewed horror. ‘NO!’ he said. ‘Don’t think that. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t! I would never . . . ’
He was desperate for me to believe, but I was desperate for someone to blame, and my rage had finally crested beyond thought. I don’t know how far I would have gone – what depths of violence I would have sunk to – had I not punched him in the mouth then, hard enough to split his lip.
The edges of the wound opened white against the blue of his skin, but no blood came out. Of course not, I thought, corpses don’t bleed. This sucked all the power from me, and I released him, staring at the bloodless wound on his mouth.
He curled against the wall and rested his head on his knees. Dom’s heavy curls fell in limp rat’s tails onto the soiled denim of his beloved new jeans. He sobbed again and laced his fingers over his head, Dom’s raggedly bitten fingernails digging into the backs of his hands. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.
‘If I could kill you, without hurting Dom’s body, I would. You’ve broken everything. You’ve ruined everything.’
‘I only jumped to get away from the man,’ he said, his voice thick and muffled.
‘Shut up.’
Oh God, it was Lorry. Lorry was here all this time.’ ‘
His breath broke up again into ragged little sobs, and he lost control for another moment. I let myself topple over backwards into the sand and dug the heels of my hands into my eyes, listening to him cry.
I mean it, Francis. Shut up, or so help me God.’ ‘
‘I wuh . . . wanted to protect . . .I.. . .I can’t remember . . . I can’t remember if it was you or your brother.’
‘It was DOM!’ I yelled, rolling onto my elbows to face him. ‘It was DOM, you stupid bastard! Can’t you at least remember which of us you killed!’
‘I wanted to protect him. I jumped in front of him, I tried to cover him with muh . . . with my body.’ His teeth were bared, and his hands fisted up by the sides of his face in a physical effort not to break down. He stared at me with eyes that showed white all around the iris. He was raw, as raw as I felt. We were bleeding all over the place from invisible wounds.
‘Something happened,’ he said. ‘Something slipped and suddenly I wuh . . . suddenly I was in a tiny dark space. It was too hot. There was no air. And we were pressed up against one another, struggling against one another. This other person. I thought . . . ’ He scrambled to his knees and put his face close to mine in an effort to get me to understand. Dom’s face, his black hair plastered down over white skin, purple bruises under his eyes, the white split in his lip gaping, his eyes as black as pitch. ‘I thought it was the bad man,’ he cried. ‘I thought he’d got me at last. And I fought . . . I pushed. Do you understand?’
He tilted his head, his miserable pleading expression an awful parody of Dom, and I had to shut my eyes tight and bury my face in my hands just so I didn’t have to see it.
I dropped back onto the sand and rolled over onto my side with a groan. Jesus, you bastard, I thought, can’t you at least let me hate you? Can’t you give me that much? That I can hate the boy who killed my brother?
I don’t know how long I lay there, but I think it was a long, long time. I remember thinking how nice it would be if I just fell asleep there and never woke up. But there was never any danger of that happening. Eventually the cold began to really eat into me, and I began to shiver uncontrollably. My face was aching from tears I didn’t know I’d been crying. When I took my hands away from my eyes, I felt the hot tingle of blood rushing back into the compressed skin.
James Hueston had been right – life pushes you on. And right then my body had had enough of lying in the frost and was demanding that I get up and do something about it – no matter how much my heart wanted to lie there and die.
I rolled onto my knees and stiffly pushed myself to my feet. Dom was gone, but his footprints in the sand led into the kitchen. I staggered after him, following him inside and heading upstairs to the room where it had all begun.