It’s after the boat holiday that Jay starts to change.
It’s only little things at first.
I don’t even really take much notice of them.
He’s a bit more distant, like he’s thinking about something he loved and lost. If I say something to him, it takes him a moment to focus on me before he can give me an answer. The old Jay was really quick and snappy and would throw a clever reply straight back.
He starts wearing more black and throws out all his old blue and white rugby shirts and khaki shorts that he used to wear when he was younger.
He spends more and more time up in his bedroom, instead of chatting and strumming his guitar downstairs at the kitchen table like he used to, leaning back on the wooden chair, his curls dropping over his sharp, clever face and his foot tapping up and down on the kitchen lino.
‘I never thought I’d say this,’ says Mum, ‘but I quite miss Jay playing his guitar in the kitchen.’
We laugh about it because it’s all just normal adolescent stuff, we reckon.
He’s a teenage boy, after all, and loads of girls at my school have brothers who are way weirder than Jay. Bindi’s cousin is sixteen and obsessed with fish. He wants to be a marine biologist when he leaves school. Her aunt doesn’t much care. Her main priority is to get him married off to a nice Indian girl so that she can have some grandchildren to spoil and cook for.
If I look back now at how Jay was then, I can almost chart the journey towards what happened, but at the time I just went along with whatever he did because I was his Liles, his baby sister, and I kind of adored him . . . when he wasn’t pissing me off, as brothers do.
Later on, that boat holiday took on a sort of sad orange glow, as if it was the last time any of us were truly happy, as if we had been living in a protective bubble, and some big god with a sharp pin was hovering right above us, about to plunge it in.
It’s six weeks after the holiday, and we’re up in his bedroom with the door shut and his latest Manic Street Preachers album blaring out.
I’m lying on the bed watching Jay.
He’s started straightening his hair over the last week or so. He’s trying to make it look more like Richey from the Manics.
‘I think it looked OK curly,’ I offer from where I’m staring up at the old glow stars on his ceiling. Mum stuck them up there when he was a little boy, and despite Jay’s best efforts at scraping them off, they’re still there.
After he disappeared, I spent hours lying in there in the dark looking up at the little moon-shaped lights.
Stupid.
Like a load of stick-on planets could give me any answers.
Jay pulls the irons down over a section of his fringe until it flops against his pale forehead, dead black and straight. He’s started to dye his hair too. The dark-brown curls that turned coppery-red in the sun have been replaced by this dead black gloss, the colour of the old vinyl LPs that he collects at record fairs and sometimes plays on an ancient record player of Dad’s. He’s wearing tight black jeans, grey plimsolls and a black long-sleeved top.
‘Who asked you?’ he says.
The tone of his voice catches me by surprise.
I sit upright and stare at him in the mirror.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I just liked your hair the way it was. But it’s cool now too.’
Jay nods, unsmiling.
‘How’s it going at school, Liles?’ he says, and I blather on in that twelve-year-old way about homework and teachers and two girls who are trying to bully me, and he makes ‘hmm’ noises from time to time, but I get the strangest feeling that he’s just going through the motions. As if deep within him something’s been switched off.
‘Well, let me know if you want me to come in and beat anyone up,’ he says, like he always does. But this time it doesn’t seem like so much of a joke.
I get up and make for the door.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I will. How are things at school with you?’
Jay catches my eye in the mirror and then looks away.
‘Most of them act like idiots,’ is all he says, but I pick up on some hurt in his voice.
As I close the door, he whacks up the volume on his stereo and then starts to apply black eyeliner around the insides of his eyelids ready for band practice later.
I stand outside his bedroom door for a moment, feeling at a loss as to what to do next. I put my hand on the door handle as if to go back in, because I’d rather spend more time with Jay than talk to Dad about big cats for the rest of the evening, but something about the rawness of the music makes me stop.
It’s the first time I feel it.
It’s only a brief flash, but it cuts through all my childish thoughts and touches something deeper inside that throbs with shock, like a tongue running over a tooth that needs a filling.
I shake my head to rid myself of the feeling.
I close myself up in my bedroom and write an English essay, but my heart’s not really in it.
Jay’s music stops at eight and he thunders downstairs and off to band rehearsal.
I watch him from behind my curtains.
His lanky, hunched figure walks with purpose down the road. He tosses his hair back every now and then before he becomes a little stick in the distance, but I watch for as long as I can.
Even after he’s gone, I carry on staring down the street for a long time.
The house feels like the warmth’s gone out of it when Jay’s not around.
I go downstairs with a sigh and spend the evening talking to Dad, but I can’t stop looking at the clock.
‘Are you late for something?’ says Dad. ‘Because as far as I can remember, you’re twelve, which means that the only thing left for you to do tonight is take a bath and go to bed. Right?’
In those days I hadn’t yet come up with my Lilah-isms, so I just give him a mock-glare and then slope off upstairs.
Parents think they’re so funny with all the sarcasm stuff. As if they know everything in the world and they’ve got it all sorted out, and there’s nothing that could ever happen that would shock or throw them off course, because they’d just carry on being those wise old parents.
But even they couldn’t stop the bomb from going off in our house.