Truth be told, the house never felt the same after Luke passed away. It became just that: a house, not a home. Nothing felt the same after Luke left. We papered over the cracks, but it was just a matter of time until something terrible happened.
I isolated myself as much as I could. I was game for anything that didn't involve other people. I devoured paperbacks. I ran along the grassy cliffs that lead to the beach, and I savoured the sensation of drowning out the outside world by swimming laps at the local pool.
I tended to live in my own bubble, like I wore a headset that played music at full blast. That was probably why I didn't notice the three boys from the conker trees until it was too late to run.
It was early evening and it must have been winter because the windows of the changing room were pitch black. I'd swum more laps than ever before, relentlessly kept going and going. I was just drying myself, wondering whether I had enough coins in my pocket to buy a chicken soup from the machine. I didn't even look up: I just saw three large shadows on the tiled floor and I knew I was in trouble. I instinctively glanced over my shoulder. My heart sunk to the pit of my stomach.
“There is no big brother to help you this time,” one of them said, laughing. They picked me up and dragged me to the showers, one holding my feet, another gripping their hands around my shoulders. I kicked and scratched and screamed, but then I went completely limp, utterly silent. They pulled my bathers down so that I lay naked on the floor, the hot water from the shower burning my skin. I closed my eyes and counted. Waited for them to finish, to leave me alone. I reached the number sixty-three before they stopped firing punches and kicks down against my bruised face and body.
That was when things really changed, when it truly hit home that, without my brother by my side, I was weak, horrid, loathsome. I couldn't bear to look myself in the mirror anymore, so why would anybody else want to look at me, let alone spend time with me? It was years before I started making friends again. And then I discovered something that numbed my pain, that boosted my confidence, helped me hide from the torrid reality: booze.
Dad enters the room with two cups. Mine is milk and no sugar. Sometimes I take my coffee black, just to vary things up, but never my tea. Dad didn't need to ask. Never before has a simple cup of tea been so welcome, so inviting. I blow a circle around the rim of the cup. We drink in silence, just like Mum and Dad did. Dad takes away the empty cups and washes them at the sink. I hear him dutifully putting the cups on the plastic drainer. He comes back full of energy, his hands upturned.
"Want to see your bedroom?"
I am up on my feet and following him up the stairs. I remember the creeks, how I worried that I would be heard when I took the stairs that last time. I don't even question why he is keen to show me my bedroom.
"I haven't changed a thing," my dad says, glancing around the four corners, his cheeks a beautiful shade of crimson.
I break into a smile, but for all the wrong reasons. I just cannot - absolutely cannot – fail to think of the Hot Tub Time Machine film. It feels so wrong to think of this in the circumstances. But I'm instantly transferred to 1988. A poster of Ruud Gullit, in his short-sleeved tangerine shirt, is flimsily pinned to the wall with blue tac. A bright-eyed Paul Gascoigne in a Newcastle shirt looks over at me from the cover of a pile of Shoot magazines. A red plastic chair is pushed under the wooden desk where I used to complete my homework. It looks like any other teenage bedroom from the time. But then I glance at the window, the one that overlooks the Bristol Channel. I know that on the other side of the window, to the right, is a black drain pipe that is nailed to the wall, and that if you are careful and do not pull back too harshly on the pipe then you can use it to navigate all the way down to the ground, to the big world outside.
"We should have seen the signs," my dad says. He looks down at my shoes. He shakes his head. From this angle I can see that his wispy grey hair is plastered down over his scalp. There are a few red pimples coating his crown. "You started spending more and more time in this room. We just thought it was a normal part of being a teenager, of growing up and finding your feet. You know? But looking back, we should have known. You were fascinated by him before it even happened, weren't you? These very walls were filled with newspaper clippings. That wasn't normal. It was like it was meant to happen, like it was a story that was just unfolding..."
I feel like punching my fist against the wall. No, that is not right. I feel like punching my fist against my
