The Things We Promise

by J. C. Burke

  I stood there for a while and just breathed. It felt like I needed to refuel before I got home because who knew what would be happening in there. Would Mum be cleaning? Would she be back in bed with the crying disease? Maybe she’d driven past another church and seen a sign she didn’t like?

  I wasn’t ready to go home, so I sat on the kerb and breathed while the cars rushed past and an icy wind streaked across my legs.

  Upstairs the Carpinettas’ door was closed, which was strange. They were definitely home because I could hear the television on inside. My eyes scanned up the stairs and I remembered Saul carrying Mrs C.

  There were seventeen stairs in total and I wondered if that meant Saul had groaned seventeen times. Once for each step.

  When he’d come back down he said he’d done a hammy and slipped a disc. None of us cared. We all just burst out laughing. Maybe it wasn’t a joke? Maybe Saul was already sick. Maybe it really had been too much for him.

  Tonight, Billy would be calling – and I was terrified. Terrified of how Billy would sound. Terrified that I’d say the wrong thing because I didn’t even know how to start the conversation.

  I unlocked the front door to our flat, wondering if it would be too chicken of me to get Mum to talk to Billy first. Just in case he wasn’t up to speaking to me yet. As I closed the door behind me I decided that it wasn’t too chicken. That way would be easier for both of us.

  But there was no need to ask because on the couch, sitting there in the dark like a shadow, was my brother.

  The next couple of minutes were a blur. One second I was at the door and the next Billy and I were on the couch, a tangled, sobbing ball.

  It was a while before I realised that I had stopped crying. I went to break away but Billy pulled me back tighter into his hug, like he couldn’t let go. His sobs sounded like some strange animal, low and braying, and it was freaking me out.

  ‘Billy,’ I was whispering in his ear. ‘Billy. Oh, Billy.’

  I was racking my brains to try to think of what Mum would do. Straight away, I thought about the day that Matt Leong and Billy had broken up. Billy had fallen into Mum’s arms, just like he’d done with me, and cried and cried. She didn’t try to stop him. All she did was rub his back and utter his name. Just like I was doing now.

  Mum appeared at the doorway holding two mugs, steam spiralling from the top of them. I knew one was for Billy because it was his I Love New York mug. Saul had given it to him. Billy brought it back here the first Christmas he came home from New York. Apart from last Christmas, that was the only time Saul hadn’t come home too.

  Later, Billy had confessed that he didn’t know what Saul would think of our daggy flat and fifteen-year-old car that didn’t even have FM radio.

  Mum put the two cups of tea on the coffee table and turned on the light.

  Now, I could look at Billy. Scan him up and down for any hints of what his body might be cooking, because it wasn’t the sort of thing I could just come straight out and ask.

  His face was thin like the stuffing had been sucked out of his cheeks. It made his nose look even longer than usual and I knew that when he was feeling a bit better I could tease him about that and it might make him laugh. Apart from that, he didn’t look too bad. Just tired. Maybe he was okay?

  Mum sat on the arm of the couch, her hand hanging over Billy’s shoulder so easy, like he’d never been away. Suddenly I noticed that Mum’s face was thinner too.

  ‘How are you, Gem?’ Billy said, squeezing my knee. ‘I’ve missed you. I could’ve done with having you around these last few weeks.’

  ‘That’s the mug Saul gave you,’ I said.

  ‘Sure is,’ Billy answered. ‘He gave it to me as a reminder that I loved New York. When I got back after that Christmas I said to him, “It’s you I love.” That was the real beginning of us.’ Billy hung his head and started to cry again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered. I wanted to kick myself for being such an idiot.

  ‘Gem, it’s not your fault,’ he answered. ‘I’m just very, very sad. Everything makes me cry at the moment.’

  ‘Is that my tea?’ I asked Mum and straight away wanted to kick myself again for following up with such a pathetic question when all I wanted was to say something deep and meaningful.

  ‘Tea with three sugars,’ Mum said.

  ‘Three sugars?’ Billy raised his head and looked at me. ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since, since …’ But I stopped myself from saying it.

  ‘Sugar’s bad for you,’ Billy said. ‘At least have honey instead.’

  ‘Honey? Yuck!’

  ‘Honey? Yuck!’ Billy imitated me, crinkling up his nose the way I did.

  That only made me burst into tears. Suddenly, in one long sob, I was blurting out all the things I wanted to say. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know Saul was sick. No one told me. If I did I would’ve called him. I would’ve called you to see how you were. But I didn’t know. How are we going to have Christmas without him? It won’t be the same. Poor Saul. Poor Saul. I can’t believe I’m never going to see him again. Oh, Billy, you must be so sad.’

  The next morning, I didn’t bother getting up for school. Mum didn’t come into my room clapping her hands in my face like she usually would if I’d slept in.

  The TV was on upstairs at the Carpinettas’ but our house was quiet. I crept past Billy’s room on the way to the bathroom. The door was ajar and I could hear him snoring. A short piggy snort, but not with every breath. That was Billy’s tune. Sometimes they could be minutes apart and suddenly you’d hear one and jump.

  But what was missing today was the other half of the melody: Saul’s whistling hiss. Constant and with every breath he took. Saul’s whistle sounded like he was imitating a landing plane. It started at the top and down, down the sound descended until there was silence.

  But I would never hear that sound again. The song of Billy and Saul was never to return. It hurt. I felt it right in that little triangle, the point below the chest, with the funny name. The point I’d learnt about when doing my Bronze Medallion. The place you have to feel for, then measure two finger spaces before you lay your hands on the patient’s chest to perform CPR. The tip of my finger touched it now and I tried not to think about whether they did CPR on Saul.

  Billy hadn’t told me much about Saul dying. All I knew was that he died in hospital at 6.22 a.m. Billy was the only one there. He said Saul was off with the pixies when he died, that he didn’t know what was happening.

  Billy said that he was sorry that they hadn’t told me Saul was sick, but Saul hadn’t wanted me to worry. How could I argue with that? You can’t argue with someone who’s dead and buried.

  I walked back to my room and peered through my curtains. I wasn’t ready to fully open them and let the punishing light in. It was easier to be here in the dark because it was almost like it was a blanket on my sadness. Somehow the darkness soothed it. Kept it bedded down. Kept it quiet.

  Tomorrow would be the eighth of May. The tree across the road that Billy used to tell me fairies lived in was almost bare. It struck me how ugly and stern it suddenly looked without its covering of green.

  It made me feel horrible so I crawled back into bed. I wrapped my arms around the pillow and lay there in the dark wondering how long this sadness was going to hang around.

  9

  SAUL HAD BEEN IN HOSPITAL FOR THREE weeks before he died. Again I kept my lips zipped but I was shocked I hadn’t known that either.

  At least one thing made sense: all those days that Mum had cried. Now I understood that only some of her tears had been for Matt Leong. Most of them had been for Saul.

  Saul and Billy had made a video. Now Mum, Billy and I were sitting up on the couch, waiting for it to start like it was a new release we’d hired for the night. But it wasn’t like that. I was so tense I couldn’t even sit back into the cushions.

  The screen went fuzzy like it always did the second before a video was about to start. The fi
rst shot was of someone’s feet. There was the sound of Billy and Saul laughing and suddenly my breath was escaping in a long, singing sigh.

  ‘Gem, are you okay?’ Mum asked.

  I nodded quickly.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I answered.

  ‘Sorry.’ Billy was actually chuckling. ‘It took me a while to get the hang of the camera. Saul was the cameraman, not me.’

  ‘You have to stand back,’ Saul was instructing. ‘Further, further … Keep it steady, Bill.’ A white wall, a green curtain, someone’s bare feet again, the sound of Billy laughing and then, there on the screen, was a man climbing into a hospital bed, turning over, smoothing hair off his face and putting on a cap. ‘Hang on a minute.’ He was clearing his throat and fiddling with the tube in his nose. Then he said, ‘Hi guys, it’s me. Coming to you from Room 6, St Bernard’s Hospital, Greenwich Village. Just three blocks down from my favourite bagels. Not that I’ve been eating them. As you can see, I’m skin and bones. Not very pretty …’

  This wasn’t Saul. Did Billy have the wrong video? But it was him because this man was looking straight into the camera and saying, ‘How’s my favourite gal?’

  Mum put her arm around me and was speaking softly. ‘It’s just a short message for you, darling. We don’t have to play it now. It can wait for another time.’ But I shook my head. I had to see it.

  Dotted around Saul’s face were dark splotches, the colour of plums, that looked like squashed jubes. Like he’d dropped some in the bed and slept on them and now they were stuck to his face.

  But what really had my attention were Saul’s teeth. I couldn’t stop staring at them. They looked huge, as though they’d outgrown every other feature on his face. All I could think about was that he reminded me of the grinning horse on a birthday card Justin had given me when I’d turned fourteen. Neighly forgot to wish you a Happy Birthday. What a crazy, stupid, demented thing to be thinking right then, but the image was stuck in my brain and I couldn’t get it out.

  ‘… anyway, I’ve been thinking about you, Gem,’ Saul kept speaking. ‘Tons of things keep popping into my head. Mostly the time Bill and I took you to the Boy George concert. Remember how I really didn’t want to go? How I wanted to give my ticket to Andrea but your brother made me come? So I did what I was told and next thing I knew I was dancing with you on my shoulders and belting out “Karma Chameleon” at the top of my lungs. Remember?’

  I was sitting there nodding, as though Saul was right there talking to me. ‘That was our moment, hey, Gem? Everything was okay after that.’ Saul was smiling but it was the saddest smile I’d ever seen. ‘Remember how the next day you and me went to the record shop and I bought all his albums?’

  ‘Yeah, and you drove me crazy playing them all the time,’ Billy’s voice piped up from behind the camera. ‘“Church of the Poison Mind”. You played that song until I thought I was going to—’

  ‘Well, that’s my favourite—’ Saul said, starting to hum the tune. But he couldn’t finish because he’d started coughing.

  ‘You want to stop?’ Billy asked him.

  Saul was lifting his hands as if to say wait a minute.

  ‘How about a break?’ But Billy’s voice was being drowned out by the hacking sounds of Saul’s cough. The video stopped.

  A second later, Saul was back on the screen. His cap was off but his head was down. His hair flopped across his forehead and his fingers pressed at the tube sitting in his nostrils. I could tell that he was trying to settle his breath.

  When he looked up, he pushed the hair off his face and smiled into the camera. ‘So what I wanted to say was that I’ve been tripping down memory lane with you, Gemma, and it’s been mighty fine.’ It felt as though he was looking right at me, as if I was the only one in the room. ‘You’ll always be my favourite gal …’ For a second the smile slipped off his face. ‘You know that, don’t you?’ He swallowed. ‘My favourite gal.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ I kept repeating it until I realised that the screen had turned black.

  It was hard to fall asleep that night. Every time I closed my eyes I pictured Saul’s face, covered in squashed blackberry jubes, grinning at me like a horse with huge teeth. The other thing I hadn’t seen at first, because he was wearing a cap, was how Saul’s hair had thinned out and almost turned white. If it wasn’t for the purple marks all over his face he would’ve probably just faded into the pillows.

  Saul had been thirty-one when he died, but today the man I’d seen could’ve been a hundred.

  My fingers touched the triangle on my chest because again that was where it hurt. As though under my ribs my heart was actually aching.

  For me, the Boy George concert with Billy and Saul had been about more than converting Saul to our Boy Brigade. Yet for all these years, I had forgotten.

  Saul and I had never discussed it. But he was right. It had been our moment. Everything was okay after that night.

  The concert was during my first Christmas holidays with Saul. When Mum told me Saul was coming home with Billy I was so excited. But once they were here, my excitement began to turn sour. They were out most nights clubbing, then sleeping late into the afternoon. The door to Billy’s room was always closed and the few times I plucked up the guts to knock and go in, Billy seemed uninterested in talking to me.

  When I was in the kitchen or living room with just Saul I could never think of anything to say and it didn’t feel like Saul was trying that hard to make conversation with me.

  If I grumbled to Mum, she’d either say, ‘Don’t take it personally,’ or the more annoying line, ‘The complaints bureau is closed for the day, Gemma.’

  It wasn’t like I could share it with Andrea because when I’d told her Saul was coming out with Billy, the first thing that popped out of her mouth was, ‘They are going to be doing it in your house. That’s gross, Gemma.’

  Then one afternoon, a week before Christmas, Billy surprised me.

  ‘I have an early Chrissy present for you,’ he’d said. ‘And you’ll never guess what it is.’

  ‘A kitten?’

  ‘No!’ Mum called out from her workroom.

  ‘Much better,’ Saul added. ‘This gift doesn’t poop everywhere.’

  ‘What? Tell me?’

  From out of his pocket Billy held up some tickets. ‘Boy George at the Western Showground. Tomorrow night!’

  Of course I knew the concert was on but I’d given up on the idea of going because I was too young and the tickets were so expensive. So I was running around the kitchen table screaming when I realised I’d seen three tickets, which meant Saul was coming too. It was like my batteries suddenly went flat and my running faded to a feet-dragging limp.

  ‘So, you and me and Saul are going?’ I moaned, and I knew that my feelings weren’t hiding in the question.

  ‘Yeah. Who else?’ Billy answered.

  ‘Um, Andrea?’ I said. ‘She started the Boy Brigade.’

  ‘Well, Andrea can buy her own ticket then.’

  ‘Why doesn’t Andrea take my ticket?’ Saul offered. ‘I mean, you’re wasting the ticket on me, Bill. I’m no fan of the Boy.’

  ‘No. I bought the tickets for the three of us to go together.’

  ‘Hey, it’s no big deal,’ Saul said.

  ‘It is to me, Saul. I want us all to go together.’

  ‘But if Gem’s friend is a fan and I’m not …’

  ‘No. It’s the three of us. End of story.’

  Saul mouthed, ‘Sorry,’ to me before following my brother out of the kitchen and into his room where the door slammed behind them.

  ‘Still feeling left out?’ Mum asked.

  I opened my mouth to answer then promptly closed it because the real answer had just dawned on me. It wasn’t that I was feeling left out. It was that I didn’t want to share my brother. I had to share Billy with Mum but that was different because we were blood. But now I’d been demoted further down the ladder by a non-blood and I knew it’d be imposs
ible to scramble back up again.

  Sulking wasn’t my thing. I wasn’t averse to putting Mum in the freezer for a few hours, but days of not talking seemed like a big waste of time and energy. However, for the next twenty-four hours, I wore a face so long it could’ve made The Guinness Book of Records.

  My symptoms grew worse. I felt like I had lead in my shoes and a brick in my tummy. They were competing with each other, too, because they were both there for different reasons. The lead in my shoes was because I wanted to go to the concert with just my brother. Then Billy and I could dance as crazily as we wanted. I wanted him to lift me onto his shoulders and when everyone behind us would shout at me to get down, Billy could tell them to shut up. We would be unstoppable.

  Now it was going to be me, my brother and his boyfriend. They’d be dancing together and I’d be the third wheel. The little sister hanging around like a bad smell. Everybody would probably think I was there because they had to babysit me, not because I was the real Boy George fan.

  The brick was in my tummy because I hated myself for feeling like that.

  Before the concert started, Saul offered to buy me the program and a T-shirt and I actually said, ‘No, thank you.’ Even when he suggested we should push further up the front I answered, ‘It’s okay.’

  But when the crowd started cheering and the loud voice announced, ‘Ladies and gents, I give you Boy George,’ I couldn’t help myself. I was screaming and jumping around like a mental case and just like that Saul scooped me up and sat me on top of his shoulders.

  ‘Get down!’ the people behind started calling.

  ‘Shut up, would you?’ Saul shouted back. ‘How’s she expected to see over everyone? She’s his biggest fan.’

  I wrapped my arms around his neck and Saul danced crazily for both of us. We were unstoppable.

  Saul had been spot on. It was our moment. Simple. And it made everything okay after that.

  Finally, when I fell asleep, the picture of Saul’s face wasn’t the main image in my head because now I had the Boy George concert to remember. But what made me feel warm inside, what allowed me to close my eyes and drift away, was knowing that just a few weeks ago Saul had been lying in his hospital bed thinking about me and him too.