Not little, because she was conceived at the same time as me. Technically older, actually, because she came out early, and dead. And that’s how she’d always be: like rubber. Like one of those fake newborn babies you see on TV. In films. Rubber. Limbs giggling like the tits her lips never sucked from.
I’m already coming down.
If you drop those limbs they bounce. If my parents dropped her when she was pulled out, dead, and placed into their arms, if they’d dropped her, just to see what dropping a baby felt like without doing any harm because its cream-egg-sized heart wasn’t beating, would she have bounced? I wonder.
Boing.
A bouncy ball bouncing off the walls.
Did she even have bones?
I could never grip and choke her like a twin brother is, play fighting, supposed to.
Boing.
Calcium melts at around 860 degrees. Bones do not melt like rubber. As a porous matrix of mineral crystals they fall apart, resembling billions of hands holding each other tight, then tenderly letting go. My brother’s porous matrix of mineral crystals disintegrated just like that. Decorated a puddle of rubber as though lemon zest on a cheesecake, while my sister and I were watching. Blood racing on adrenaline. And then everything slowed down. Blood vessels rubbernecking, like cars at the side of a motorway.
Boing.
Rubber melts at around 180 degrees. Cars bounce. ‘Can you feel that?’ says my sister.
‘Feel what?’ I ask.
‘The blood,’ she says, ‘pumping through your head.’
‘I think that’s all I can feel,’ I tell her, as I lie in my bed with my head between the mattress and the paralysing prospect of getting up.
‘Can you hear it?’ she says.
‘It sounds like a–’
‘It sounds like when you put your ear to a seashell. When you listen to the sea. Remember when we last went to the sea? In France? The last family holiday. The cottage in Brittany, the one with the locked door on the upstairs landing and the stuffed pygmy alligator?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think there were bodies behind that door?’
‘Shut up.’
‘Our dead brother trod on a weaver fish and had to soak his foot in hot water.’
‘It sounds like my–’
‘And our father left early on business. What is it you think he was doing? Do you think it concerned Gentleman Jim?’
I’ve stopped listening.
My sister tells me to breathe.
My sister says, ‘Do you smell it?’
Your heart keeps missing beats. And your temples are throbbing. Two tiny hands, a baby’s hands, are pulling them together from the inside to crush your brain, drip out of your nose and onto the bed sheet. My phone is ringing and I can’t even summon the strength to put it on silent. I just want–
‘What’s that?’ says my sister.
‘I want to–’
‘Hide in a fort made of pillows?’ she says. ‘Did you have a nice time with Willow, by the way? Did you reminisce?’
They stood in silence outside the pub as he rolled another cigarette, she shivering in the wind, wiping her nose on her scarf. He moved deliberately slow, making her wait. When he eventually lit the cigarette and put the red lighter back in his jacket pocket she started to walk down the street. But he took her by the arm, stopping her, pulling her towards him. Then he kissed her. His cigarette between his fingers, his hand on her cheek.
‘Fuck me,’ says my sister, rolling her eyes. ‘I know you left her,’ she says, ‘feeling paranoid about death, brain haemorrhaging, after taking all that cocaine in the toilet and scaring her off, again, with all your talk of murdering.’
‘It’s not murder when you’re given permission.’
‘And now you can’t sleep, deeply uncertain as you are about what potential you have left for any future habitation on this earth. Head buried and buried further. Veins jerking so hard, working your jaw muscles so hard you can feel your–’
Wait.
‘–temples swelling. Expanding. Contracting like metal rapidly cooling. Car chassis on an icy road. In flames. Rattling heart–’
Let me count–
‘–beat, heartbeat, heart beating the bedsprings that shake. Waiting for the police to finally take you away. Do you think it’d fix anything, anyway, if you got back together? Go out for dinner? Italian? Go back to work? Make money while she decorates this tiny flat with flowers? Be normal again? Ignore me, again? You’re not at university anymore. You’re fully grown. It’s okay.’
–to one.
‘It’s okay, feels okay, doesn’t it, when you’re surrounded by people who think you bring something to the table. It’s just–’
Two.
‘–that it’s only when you’re alone again, that you see–’
Three.
‘–just how bare the table is.’
Four.
‘Its edges are cliffs. And spaghetti is a rope that stops halfway.’
Five.