SPIKE AND I stood for a long time on that landing outside Osi’s door. Rain dripped through a hole in the ceiling above us and pigeons crooned, a sound incongruously summery. If he’s dead he’s dead, I told myself, the sort of sensible remark that sounds as if it helps. Oh sometimes my poor old mind thinks it can’t take any more shocks, but then it gets another and seems to go on working – working after a fashion.

‘Ma-am?’ Spike said eventually, he was casting nervous looks up at the rafters and shivering, not surprising in his wetly woollen jumper. I should have had him take it off and dry himself.

‘Here goes,’ I said, with an attempt at jauntiness, and stretched my face into a smile before I turned the handle.

Cold brightness met us, windows open, curtains on the floor. The pigeon smell was not so powerful in here; there was something else. And then I saw Osi. He was alive, naked, crouching on the bed, back pressed against the wall, knees drawn up to his chest, eyes huge, beard like a doormat, string of grey gristle slumped between his legs.

‘Cover up, for pity’s sake,’ I said, when I could speak. ‘We have a guest.’

Though Spike had backed out of the door.

I picked a blanket from the floor and draped it over my brother’s knees. His skin was cold, surely could not be colder if he had been dead. ‘What a state you’re in,’ I scolded. ‘Really, Osi!’

He’d gone bald since last I’d seen him and his nose, always so long and beaky, seemed hardened now; it was a beak, the mouth shrunken away beneath the copious dinge of beard. His eyes were two dark tunnels leading to . . . I shudder to think.

‘Osi!’ Now that he was decent I shook him and he squawked. I jumped back at the raucous sound, bird sound, and all at once understood that that is what he thought he was. He was crouching as if perched, long horny toenails splayed like claws.

‘Osi, it’s Sisi . . . Isis,’ I cranked out that old name and how awkwardly it issued from my mouth. ‘Isis. It’s me.’

I watched but nothing was occurring in his eyes.

‘What have you been eating?’ I said. ‘You haven’t pulled the bucket up for days.’ Of course the floor was strewn with balls of gold and silver from his Dairylee and chocolate bars, and there were stacks of cardboard wheels reaching to the ceiling like his blessed temple columns. Everything was scrawled with hieroglyphs, all the walls, overlapping, blurring each other, and some of them were done in blood, I think, and some in something thick and brown I cannot even bear to name and once I’d noticed that, I caught the smell too, that filthy human smell. His fingernails, those awful horny twists, were caked with dirt and stuck with hairs, enough to make you sick.

This was Osi. This was my twin. I thought my heart would break.

I heard a cough behind me and almost left my skin behind. I had forgotten Spike was there. I turned and tried again for the reassuring smile but my face felt tight and false.

He had a hand clamped over his mouth and spoke through his fingers. ‘I reckon I’ll go now, Ma-am?’

‘First, be a dear and fetch the food from the bucket,’ I said. ‘And some water? Please, dear. I could do with a hand. He’s really not himself.’

Spike went out and I heard him struggling and slithering on the stairs and a yell as his foot went through the third. He was swearing continuously and who could blame him? I stood and listened. Oh my fucking God, Jesus fucking Christ, fuck fuck fucking fuck and so on in a sort of dirge, punctuated by gasps and sneezes and retching sounds. To do him credit, he didn’t run away.

‘Come on, Osi,’ I said and at last he seemed to register that I was there and cocked his head to focus on me.

‘It’s me, Isis,’ I said. The name was dangerous, likely to haul me back. ‘Sisi, your sister,’ I said. ‘You haven’t pulled the bucket up for days. Remember the system? I’ve come to see how you are.’

As I talked I found another blanket to drape around his shoulders. I tried to shut the windows, but the frame had broken and, in any case, the glass was gone. The curtains were in a squelchy heap from all the blown in rain; part of the ceiling was down, the rest of it intricately mapped with stains. I continued to talk to him, just soothing nonsense, soothing to myself at least, though my mind was scrabbling for what on earth I was going to do with him like this. He squawked again, a dreadfully chilling sound.

‘Speak properly,’ I scolded.

As I watched, his jaw began to move, stirring the beard and a hole opened underneath the nose, and then he spoke a word, although I couldn’t catch it. His voice was so unused to speaking that it would hardly work.

‘Again,’ I said. ‘Try again.’

And he tried several times, with effort in his eyes, an expression come into them now, a pleading for me to understand, and then, with a plummeting of my heart, I understood him. He was saying ‘Horus’.

Spike came back in, bless him, with the Dairylee and Jacobs cream crackers.

‘Thank you, dear. Just the ticket.’

He put his offerings on the bed and stretched one of the sleeves of his jumper across his nose and mouth like a sort of mask, eyes widened above it.

‘Could you fetch some water?’ I asked. He went off again and I listened to him on the stairs again. This time I was afraid that he might really leave, but no, he came back with one of the Bacardi Breezer bottles filled with water.

‘Why not look around the bedrooms?’ I suggested. ‘You might find a rug – or take anything. Have a good old poke around.’

When he’d gone I tore the Jacob’s wrapper open with my teeth, peeled the foil off a cheesy triangle, mashed it onto a cracker, and held it close to Osi’s mouth.

‘You’re not Horus, you’re Osiris,’ I said and when his mouth opened, popped a bit of cracker in. ‘Remember?’ His hunger woke once we’d begun and he ate five crackers, most of the cheese and glugged the water. The feelings of love, relief and revulsion as the lipless hole churned at the food were so strong I could barely contain myself, but I went on feeding him until he would take no more.

And the sensation of another person upstairs in Little Egypt, wandering the rooms alone, was strange to me and I thought of the fox with the feathers between his teeth, I thought of the bird hearts beating their blood all through the house, tangles of red and blue, veins of life, wet and warm and red amongst the rotting timbers.

I sat with Osi, and I listened so hard I could hear the old nails niggle in the floorboards and the soreness of the gaps between them whistling with draughts like tooth decay. I could feel the grumble and belch of the crusted pipes and the roof beams aching with the slope and shoulder of the remaining slates. I sat listening to Little Egypt properly and wholly for the last time until Osi’s eyes were closed. As he fell asleep he became gradually unperched and slid along the bed so that I could tuck him warmly up before I left.

 

I’d forgotten Spike and was alarmed by the sound of him in the Blue Room. I hadn’t been in there since Victor. It was in comparatively good condition, just a corner of the ceiling gone, and in that corner the wallpaper with its repeating bluebirds peeled right off the wall, but otherwise it was fine and dry, the window properly closed, and even the curtains intact. Spike had rolled a rug up and had it under his arm.

‘You sure?’ he said.

I went and put my hand on the bed. ‘This is where my Uncle Victor used to stay,’ I said. ‘A hero of the war. The Great War.’

‘The first World War?’

I nodded.

‘For sure? Did European history at High School,’ he said. ‘That’s cool.’

‘I’ll tell you all about him,’ I said. ‘One day.’

We went out onto the landing and I shut the Blue Room door, the firm click of it stirring up a turmoil in my belly. Osi would be all right for tonight. He was warm and fed. But how to manage him from now on I could not even begin to think. And all at once it was too much for me. My head was reeling with too much feeling and I had to be alone. I felt an urgent need to get downstairs away from all the memories that hung like sheets, invisible, to snag and tangle me.

Spike helped me down the stairs and then I sent him away.

I sat in Mary’s chair beside the stove, hunched around my broken heart. Nine tried to jump on my lap but there was no room for her, what with all the grief. Osi still alive. His life continuing like this was almost worse than his death would have been.

I simply did not know how to carry on.