Not Francis! Not Francis at all! Dominick! Laurence had found Dominick, and he was offering him to me, even as my brother flailed to get away. At the sight of Dom, I was suffused with an unnatural calm; it just settled down over me like something physical, a kind of serene blanket; a sense of right. I reached my burning arms for him. Dom’s mouth opened in silent terror, and the sound of the sea filled the room, just as James had described it, a heavy pounding surf grinding the air. So this was Dom’s sound.
He fought. He bucked. He tried to thrash free. But Laurence held him steady, offering him up to me as best he could, and I closed my arms around him, swallowing Dom in violent, static brilliance.
As soon as we touched, their voices filled my head: the familiar, throaty rasp I recognised as Laurence; the inarticulate, fear-stricken screams that belonged to my brother.
Laurence was pleading with me. Take him. Take him, for God’s sake. You’re burning me. I can’t stand it.
Dom, his thoughts worn thin from the constant strain of fear, made no sense. There was no rhyme or reason to his words, just horror, and everything, everything about him screaming, Get away, get away.
I wrapped him in my new-found calm; I tried to share it with him. It’s okay, Dom. It’s me. It’s Patrick. Can’t you hear me? It’s Patrick. I’m here. I pulled him to me and he beat against my chest, rigid with panic. It’s me, Dom. It’s Patrick. It’s me.
He held still, his mind a frantic fluttering bird. But some part of him, some small portion, listened.
It’s Patrick, Dom. Can’t you hear me? It’s alright. I’m here.
His hand, a cold solidity against the fizzing energy of my chest, curled into my jumper and he turned his face to rest his forehead against the crook of my neck. He grappled the serpent of his panic and pinned it momentarily, his fear for me overcoming his blinding sense of self-preservation.
Get away, he whispered, the man is here.
I pushed my fingers through the knotted curls at the back of his head and held him close to me. I watched as Lorry scrambled across the room and crouched by our physical bodies, which were still slumped against the wall. His coat pooled around him, a liquid shadow on the floor as he knelt and looked into Dom’s slack face. He put his hand on Dom’s inert chest, and I saw his face soften as he whispered something gentle to the boy trapped within my brother’s body. At last – under the most appalling of circumstances – Francis could no longer run, and Lorry could assure him that he didn’t have to.
In my arms, Dom was beginning to fight me again, his heart and his breathing rapidly spiralling into a frenzy. I pulled him tighter, my eyes on Lorry, waiting for a sign. Dom’s thoughts were a hectic rising tide within him, and he pushed against me.
It’s alright, Dom, I thought. I’m here. Hold on. Hold on, Dom. I’m here.
Lorry glared at me suddenly and pointed to the floor behind me. I glanced down; the rope lay at my feet. I looked back at Lorry. What? He slapped the floorboards with angry impatience and pointed again. The rope. He pointed past me to where James must still be watching, cocooned in the yellow quiet of the trench.
Dom was bucking in my arms, and I clutched him to me with unnatural strength as he screamed against my shoulder, the sound of waves scouring the air. His thoughts were bees, and he was infecting me with his panic. Still clinging to him, I stepped back and looped the end of the rope around my ankle. James was with me at once, his voice a formless jumble of words and emotions in my mind. But solid. Real. Alive. I stared at Lorry as though he held a starter’s pistol. He raised his hand, telling James and me to wait. I heard James, suddenly loud and clear through the chaos of Dom: Whenever you’re ready, pal. Just give me a sign.
Lorry turned his attention back to Dom’s body. His face softened again, infinitely compassionate, and I saw some clue of how he must have been before all the pain and the eternity of anger. He leant down close to my brother’s body, his hands on either side of Dom’s face. He said something reassuring again, and then he turned his eyes to James and nodded.
I felt the tug on my ankle and a violent jerk as my foot was pulled out from under me. I hadn’t even had the presence of mind to kneel down, to get to the floor. I fell, and I dragged Dom with me. I remember no impact with the ground; just a gliding passage over the threshold of the grey, Dom’s incoherent screams a faint background to James’s steady voice.
Over we go! Come on, boys!
I clung to Dom, one hand in his hair, the other fisted in his jumper. I would not be letting him go. I couldn’t take my eyes from Lorry. As we were pulled, smooth and sure, over to the other side, I turned my head to keep him in sight. He was crouching over Dom’s body, his hands sunk into Dom’s chest. He was speaking with rapid gentleness. As we crossed over into the heat of the trench, I saw Lorry glance quickly our way, and then heave. A boy rose in his arms, eyes closed, head lolling, pulled like a shadow from my brother’s body . . .
GRASS, SKY, HORIZON
‘WAKE UP. ’
I rose to the surface of a refreshing and satisfied sleep, to find myself under a gentle blue sky. Clouds drifted slowly overhead, lemon-tinted with sunrise. The air was warm but scrubbed clean, like the early morning of what would be a hot day by the sea. I was lying on soft grass; birds were singing. I took a deep lungful of the fresh air and basked for a moment in sheer bliss.
I moved my fingers through the neatly cropped grass beneath my hands. It was slightly damp with dew, but I knew that soon the sun would be cresting the roll of the hill and I would be soaked in its heat. I sighed, perfectly content to lie there until kingdom come – I had never been so comfortable in my life. I turned my head. Dom lay beside me, curled on his side, his eyes open and blankly staring.
I jolted to my knees, my heart in my mouth, and knelt over him, not knowing what to do. He didn’t react to my sudden movement; his eyelids didn’t even flicker.
‘Leave him be.’
I recognised this voice as being the one that had called me awake; its soft rasp had become as familiar to me as my own. I turned to see Lorry sitting on the slope of ground behind me, the rising sun just starting to glow through his hair. He smiled at me. I reached back and put my hand on Dom’s chest. My eyes closed in relief at the gentle rise and fall of his breathing, the pumping thud of his heart beneath my palm. I sat back down on the grass, all the strength gone from my legs. I kept my hand on Dom’s chest.
Lorry breathed in deep, closing his eyes and tilting his head, tasting the air. He released his breath slowly and looked up at the fleecy clouds. He was clean-shaven and barefoot, dressed in dark trousers, the sleeves of his loose white shirt rolled to the elbow, his throat bare. The wavy tousle of his hair glowed in earnest as the sun broke the horizon, and he smiled.
Lorry? I thought. Is everything alright now? Is Dom alright? Is Francis free?
He looked at me and smiled again. I couldn’t tell if it was just an expression of his contentment or whether he was telling me that everything would be okay.
Where’s James, Lorry? Just the smile again, and I began to feel that I wasn’t quite there for him; that we weren’t exactly on the same page.
The sound of footsteps pounded the turf, and we both turned to look as a young boy thundered into sight. He came to a sliding halt on the crest of the hill and stood grinning, framed against the beautiful sky just as the sun finally spilled down the grass and washed us all with slanting morning light.
‘Lorry! The boats are in!’ The boy had two sticks in his hand, and he flung one in a winnowing arc across the air. Laurence caught it with one graceful lift of his arm over his head. They grinned at each other, these blond twins, one an older reflection of the other, and my fingers tightened around the fabric of my brother’s shirt. What about us?
Francis swished his stick through the air and turned to go. As he turned, he seemed to catch sight of me, and paused. He squinted, his hand raised in mid-swing, a little frown between his eyebrows. Then his face cleared and he shook the moment off wit
h a laugh. It was as though he had caught sight of a strange bird or a fleeting shadow, then dismissed it. He turned his grin to Lorry and flourished the stick like a sword in the air.
‘Come on!’ Francis said. ‘Race you to the harbour!’ And then he was gone, his footsteps bumping away from us across an unseen lawn.
Lorry got to his feet. He hefted the stick Francis had thrown him, bouncing it in his hand. He smiled again. ‘Good stick!’ he said to me, and swung it in an extravagant fencing gesture. He turned and casually mounted the slope, ready to follow his brother out of sight. My heart twisted at the thought that he was going to leave me here, but at the crest of the hill he stopped and turned back to me, his green eyes solemn for a moment.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Patrick.’ My voice was barely a whisper, and I was suddenly thirstier than I’d ever been in my life. His eyes dropped to Dom. ‘That’s Dominick,’ I said.
‘Is he the one?’ he asked, staring at Dom’s unmoving face. ‘The one that Fran hurt?’
I nodded. More than anything, I wanted to know: would Dom be alright? After all of this, could anyone be alright? But I couldn’t summon the words, and the regretful quirk of Laurence’s mouth made me afraid to try.
Laurence sighed deeply and gave me one last searching look. He walked backwards over the crest of the hill, keeping me in view all the time. Just as he was about to lose sight of me, as he was about to turn and follow Francis, his eyes flicked up and down, taking in my whole face as if determined to remember it. ‘Wake up,’ he said.
And I did.
DESPERATION
I WOKE UP. AGAIN. How many times had I been bumped awake in this one long night? And where was I now? I leapt to attention, my eyes wide and already focused, slapped into reality with nothing to cushion my fall.
I was sitting against the bedroom wall, clear moonlight splitting the room into light and dark. The smell of dust filled my nose, and the night-time cold of the draughty floorboards numbed my arse. I was awake. I was awake. This was real.
I didn’t have to search for Dom; my eyes found him immediately. He lay in the middle of the floor, curled into a lazy ‘S’ shape. His feet were resting comfortably, one under the other. His hands were tucked under his chin. His eyes were shut.
I scurried across the floor, moaning his name over and over. He wasn’t moving. I couldn’t see him breathe. Perhaps he was dead. I had already told James that Dom was dead; I had already believed it. But not now that I’d found him. Now that I’d hauled him out of that place. Now that I had rested my hand on his chest and felt his beating heart – I couldn’t let him be dead. Please, let him be alive.
I grabbed him and pulled him up by his shoulders. He was loose-limbed and limp as rags, and so, so cold. Not Francis-cold – normal cold, dead-body cold.
‘Dom.’ It came out a dry hiss of a word. ‘Dom!’ I shook him. ‘Come on!’
He opened his eyes and looked up at me – Dom’s eyes, clear and chocolate-brown, looking up at me as if I’d asked a surprising question. I choked out a bark of hysterical joy. Then his eyes rolled back, all the way to the whites, and he rolled out of my arms, turned away from me, and vomited all over the floor.
I’ve never seen so much puke. It stunned me into a kind of motionless awe. Kneeling over him, my hands held up in surprise, I watched as a spectacular amount of the stuff poured out of him and washed across the floorboards. His silence was eerie; he hardly even made a retching noise. His body just kept contracting and releasing, contracting and releasing, and with each painful inward curl, the tide of vomit grew.
It was everything he’d eaten since yesterday, chewed and undigested, a mass of instantly recognisable bits and pieces: the map of all that had gone before. This evening’s chicken casserole and the bread-and-butter pudding that had followed; the grease-coated sausage-and-egg-and-bacon-rasher breakfast; the chewed bites of toast; the milky wash of numerous cups of tea; even the lumpy remains of last night’s bread, butter and cheese and the white gushing tide of an entire bottle of milk.
The green pills of librium were nowhere to be seen. I found myself scanning the vile pool, watching for their vivid colour in the bland confusion of browns and creams, but they never showed up.
He stopped moving. I stared down at him, waiting for what came next.
Nothing. Nothing came next. The last contraction released its hold on him, and his body relaxed into a loose curl. His hands unfurled from under his chin and came to a rest in front of his face. He looked like he’d fallen asleep saying his prayers, except that he was lying with his cheek in a pool of his own vomit, his curls sticking to skin so pale and shiny that it reflected the moon. His eyes were closed.
‘DOM!’ I snatched him up and dragged him onto my knee again, pushing back with my feet, distancing the two of us from that disgusting puddle. ‘DOM!’ I screamed, and when he didn’t answer I just began shouting, very loud, very incoherent. I can’t to this day remember what exactly I was yelling.
This time, when the door opened, it was Ma. She flew towards us. I offered him up to her. We weren’t alone anymore.
MY MEMORIES OF that night are like snapshots: clear and sharp moments of what I know was a much longer time.
They thought it was food poisoning. They thought it was the flu. They very briefly thought it was meningitis. Theory after theory was proposed and discarded in rapid succession. The longer Dom remained unresponsive, the more puzzled their guesses became. The room emptied and then filled, and emptied again, and filled. I was pushed further and further back ’til I was standing against the wall, wedged into the corner by the dressing table.
I remember a doctor, young and stern. He wanted me to leave the room. He kept glancing at me and saying, ‘You go on outside now and wait downstairs.’ I remember wordlessly shaking my head, my back pressed to the wall, my eyes glued to Dom. I remember the doctor got very angry. Eventually he stood up and flung his stethoscope down onto the bed. It bounced and clattered to the floor just as my ma came in. She gaped at him as he strode past her, and gasped as he grabbed me by the arm.
‘Listen to me, you stupid boy!’ He was hissing into my face, but I couldn’t concentrate on him. My eyes slid past him, and I tilted my head so that I could look at Dom. The doctor shook me. ‘If you don’t leave this room now your brother will die, do you hear me?’ He had more to say, but my ma came up behind him and actually whacked him on the head. He dropped my arm like it had burnt him and ducked away from her, a look of absolute shock on his face.
She didn’t say a word, just stood there, her eyes glittering, her mouth a quivering line. She stared the doctor down. Then she raised her hand and pointed at the bottom bunk where my brother lay, still and pale in the shadows. The doctor held her eye for a moment, his cheeks two hectic flares of colour, his hand to the back of his head. Then he blushed a deep, deep red and dropped his eyes.
I got to stay in the room.
They panicked when Dom began shivering. He shivered and shook like someone had dragged him from icy water. His hands clawed up into hooks. His knees drew up to his chest. They thought for the longest while that they would never get him warm.
Morning had just started to paint the windows when my dad came running up the stairs and burst into the bedroom. I remember him making a strange sound when he saw Dom, a half wail, half shout. I remember Ma starting to cry once she saw Dad, as if she’d been waiting until he arrived. I remember him spinning suddenly from where he had been kneeling beside Dom and scanning the room with frantic eyes. It took him a long time to see me; I think I had become part of the wall by then, a shadow in the corner. Dad found me, though. His eyes locked on me, and he made a quiet growling noise far back in his throat and leapt to his feet. I don’t know why, but I thought he was going to hit me. He didn’t – of course he didn’t – he grabbed me instead and hugged me tight to him and rocked me like a baby.
They couldn’t figure out the damage to Dom’s fingers and toes. They thoug
ht maybe they were burns. ‘If I didn’t know better,’ the young doctor said, ‘I’d say he had frostbite.’
Then they found the damage to my hands and the damage to Dad’s hands. They began to wonder if it was some kind of rash. Meningitis came back into the conversation.
I remember the doctor examining the split in Dom’s lip. I remember him glancing over at my bruised jaw. I saw his eyes flick to my poor dad, and a look of disgust crossed his face. Thankfully, Dad had his attention fixed on my mother at the time.
There was brief talk of a mystery virus. The word ‘quarantine’ began to crop up. There was a suggestion of bringing Dom to Cherry Orchard Fever Hospital. My mam asked what they’d do for him there that they couldn’t do here. The doctor didn’t have a particularly good answer. Dom stayed with us.
I recall another doctor, an older man with dark, kind eyes and a Jewish face, kneeling on the floor in front of me and taking my hand. When had I slid to the floor? I couldn’t remember. The doctor wagged my hand from side to side a little, to get my attention. I looked into his eyes. I remember thinking, That’s what Dom’s eyes will look like when he’s old. Dad swam into view beside him, and he was staring intently at me. I think it was very early in the morning, but I can’t be sure because the room had that aquarium feel to it that things get when you’re very tired.
‘Patrick,’ the doctor said, ‘I want you to answer me truthfully now, yes?’ He had a strange accent, like a German accent or something.
Dad was looking at me over the doctor’s shoulder. He said, ‘We won’t be annoyed, son. We just need to know.’
I looked blankly at them both.
The doctor squeezed my hand. Normally I wouldn’t have liked that. Normally I would have jerked my hand away. But, right then, it was okay that he was holding my hand; it was more than okay. I gently tightened my grip to let him know I was listening. The doctor nodded and smiled his kind smile. ‘Did Dominick take anything he shouldn’t have? Any kind of drugs?’
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