Truth or Dare

by Non Pratt

  Ferrying me to West Bridge to get my exam results – the kind that would have been worth celebrating if everything else hadn’t felt so tragic.

  For as long as Kam was unconscious, the best was as possible as the worst. We see-sawed between hope and horror: living through hell when Kam had to go back into surgery because of a brain bleed, hearts soaring when he survived.

  Seventeen days since the fall.

  Seventeen years since I’d been born.

  His eyes opened and we thought it was a miracle. Only it wasn’t the one we were hoping for.

  The impact on his skull and spine had paralysed his left arm, damaged the part of his brain that deals with emotions and communications and left his body unable to regulate bodily functions so basic you never really think about them. Things like swallowing. Going to the loo. Things you never knew had anything to do with your brain. Kam could breathe, but he couldn’t speak, couldn’t focus, couldn’t control his movements.

  Once stable, he was moved to a different ward, one in which the focus was on the injuries his body could heal while the doctors assessed the injuries it couldn’t, measuring his reflexes, responses, his ability to communicate. Eight or below on the Glasgow Coma Scale means a serious brain injury: Kam wasn’t scoring above a five.

  Death is an ending, but Kam had been given a beginning.

  I didn’t want either. All I’ve ever wanted is my brother back.

  SEPTEMBER

  CHAPTER 3

  Ever since we moved to this house, I’d been jealous of Kam for having a room to himself.

  “First thing I’m going to do is repaint.” I leaned against the doorframe and surveyed the string-coloured walls. “Something bright and sunny. Like my personality.”

  “Calm your tits, sunshine,” Kam said, not looking up from Mum’s laptop. “Maybe wait until I get offered a place before you start Grand Designing the place.”

  “You’re not the one who has to share with halitosis in human form.”

  Kam glared up at me a moment.

  “He’s downstairs,” I said. “Smearing pus and misery on the sofa.”

  Puberty was attacking Amir like a flesh-eating disease – the bin in our room was stuffed with tissues he’d used to mop up the fluid leaking from his face, taking whatever personality he had with it. Me and Amir had never got on, but this spotty, sullen, hormonal version was even more of a ball ache than the little kid who told tales all the time and cried whenever he didn’t get his own way.

  “Like you were a bundle of laughs.”

  “I’ve always been a bundle of laughs. That’s my role in this family – to bring joy.”

  Only Kam wasn’t really listening. “Shut the door, would you?”

  Curious, I did as he said, sitting on the floor, my back against the wall, feet propped up on the bed frame – private it might be, but that room is a shoebox. Kam pushed the computer off his lap to lean forward, elbows resting on his knees, expression as serious as if he was about to answer a question on University Challenge.

  “Does he ever say anything about school?” he asked.

  “Not to me. Why?”

  “Hamish said he saw some kid shoving Amir around at breaktime, but Amir got all pissy with me when I asked him about it.”

  “Amir gets pissy when I ask what cereal he’s having.”

  Kam frowned. “This was different. Angry, like I was sticking my nose in…”

  I shoved him gently with my foot and he swatted it away. “That’s your role in the family, Kam. To be a bundle of sticking your nose in.”

  “I’m looking out for him!”

  “Amir needs to look out for himself,” I said, bored of the conversation. “Stop babying him.”

  Kam shrugged and stood up to kick me out, wanting to get back to geeking over gas giants or red dwarves or pink midgets. Space spunk stuff.

  “Family take care of each other, Sef,” he said, eyes wide and solemn. “When I’m not here, I need to know you’ll look out for Amir the way I’ve always looked out for you, yeah?”

  “Do I have to inherit your responsibilities, too? Can’t I just have the room?”

  “It’s a package deal. Now get out.”

  Redecorating was the last thing on my mind when me and Mum packed up Kam’s stuff to take to the Rec. Mum was relentless, her conversation a stream of positive thinking at how lucky we were for him to move somewhere so good, so close, as I stood on the bed untacking his posters.

  I should have known she was faking it. We all were.

  Mum pulled open his chest of drawers and stared down at a jumble of T-shirts, shut it, opened the next and started taking out all his sweaters and hoodies, tutting and throwing them onto the bed until she pulled one from the back of the drawer and held it up.

  Rust-coloured, faded, with one of the ties starting to fray at the end.

  “He hates that one,” I said.

  “I know my own son, thank you, Yousef! But it’s the only one with a zip!” She gestured wildly as if I couldn’t see for myself. “And I don’t see how I’m going to pull all those other ones over his head—” Her face crumpled in on itself and she bent her head into Kam’s hoodie, a fist of material bunched over her mouth, muffling the wail that tried to escape.

  I tripped over all the crap on the floor as I went to wrap my arms round her, squeezing her in a hug. Mum’s sobs sent shock waves of despair through me, the pair of us folding onto the bed, my arms glued round her like she’d fall apart if I let go. And we stayed there, that stupid scrunched-up hoodie pressed over my mum’s face as if she couldn’t bear for me to see her cry.

  “I’m sorry,” she said eventually, sitting away from me. “You didn’t need to see that.”

  “It’s OK…” I stroked her arm the way she does to us when we’re upset.

  “It’s not, Sef.” She lifted my hand away to sandwich it between palms smaller than mine. “You have your own burden to bear – there’s no need for you to carry mine, too.”

  “You don’t have to hide the fact you’re sad, Mum.”

  Her smile was as sorrowful as her tears. “My son is alive. There are worse things to be sad about.” She gave my hand a purposeful pat as if she was done with her woes and stood up to get on with things.

  The pile of clothes to take to the Rec was pitifully small by the time we were through. I couldn’t even suggest giving him any of mine – Kam’s built like a tank. Or he was. Mum wasn’t prepared to throw away what was left and I helped her bag it up for the loft, neither of us admitting Kam might never be in a position to need it.

  The room looked wrong stripped bare like that.

  Still looks wrong, my clothes spilling out the drawers, shelves crammed with Penguin classics and bound scripts, walls a jumble of newspaper clippings and ticket stubs.

  The only thing that belongs is the chalkboard hanging on the outside of the door that still says FOUR A*s, BABY!!!

  CHAPTER 4

  The first full week of sixth form interfered with going to the hospital, but what felt like a relief for me was torture for Amir. Every day he would plough through the front door and bombard whichever parent he found with questions, trailing them round the house the way the cat does when it’s her teatime. He’d even follow Dad upstairs to interrogate him through the bathroom door while he was on the loo.

  But once Kam moved to the Rec, it was me who got offered the first visit.

  “It’s tomorrow you have the test, isn’t it?” Mum asked while I was sitting in Dad’s armchair practising theory tests on my phone.

  “Nine in the morning.” Roll on driving licence…

  “Would you like to drive to the Recreare afterwards?” Mum has an uncanny ability to memorize our timetables faster than any of her three sons and she knew I didn’t have any lessons until after lunch.

  I looked up from my phone.

  “What about Amir?” He’d be narked if we went without him.

  “I want to see how Kam is with you before we take Amir.” Aw
are of the look I was giving her, she added, “It’s difficult for him, Sef. Kam isn’t…” She struggled with finding the right words, like they might not exist. “He’s not good with visitors.”

  I passed my theory. Booked my practical.

  None of it felt real. Unease churned insistently through my mind and my stomach, growing more insistent as we approached the Rec, Mum wincing when I took the speed bump at the gate too quickly. We were welcomed by the brown-brick walls, windows flashing gold in the mid-morning sun as I swung into a parking space.

  In reception, Mum signed us in as I stared around at the framed certificates hanging behind the desk. Along the corridors, bland awards gave way to photos of the people who stayed here. People in wheelchairs and walking frames, their crossed-eyes and twisted limbs made more obvious by the able-bodied councillors and celebrities posing with them for a photo op. There were more casual, less posed pictures too – residents and their helpers next to rows of raised flower beds or watching a string quartet in the lounge.

  Those pictures stirred something inside me – I’d call it fear, but that makes it sound simple, something that could be tamed and labelled. There was no taming the nightmare I could feel swallowing me up, my body being ingested by something so incomprehensibly terrifying it was nothing but a feeling – a numbness in my fingers, a chill in my blood.

  We took the lift up to his floor and dread soaked deeper into the marrow of my bones.

  “He’ll be pleased to see you,” Mum said.

  “Will he?” The words came out on a belch of panic.

  “Of course he will.” A reassurance for her not me.

  The lift stopped. Doors opened. Mum walked out.

  “Sef?”

  I stared at her. The pale yellow walls of the ward loomed large, like a hand reaching out to grasp me, and I could hear someone approaching, the whine of wheels on lino. I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing one of those people from the pictures.

  Couldn’t bear the thought of seeing my brother – He’s not good with visitors.

  “I can’t!” I slammed my palm on the button to close the doors before Mum could talk me out of it.

  When she came to find me, I was sitting curled up on the wall where I’d met Claire, my head pressed into my knees and my hands over my head.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered as my mum put her arms round me and kissed my head. “I don’t think I can see him.”

  “It’s OK,” she said and I knew she was crying too.

  Friday afternoon Dad cornered me in the kitchen. It was the afternoon and he was still in his work clothes, old shirt and tatty cords, frayed and faded from lifting and carrying and sitting for hours in his van.

  “You have to visit your brother.”

  Ever one to be sensitive.

  “I have.” Technically. I opened the fridge, blocking Dad out.

  “I meant at the home. He’ll want to see you.”

  I said nothing, scanning the contents of the fridge and seeing nothing.

  “So?” Dad peered round the fridge door. “Are you coming with us tomorrow?”

  We’d planned to go as a family mid-morning, when they said Kam was at his best. The thought made me feel sick.

  “I…” (wanted to say yes) “… don’t… I’ll try.”

  “What is there to try?”

  I shut the fridge, hands empty. “It’s hard, Dad—”

  “You think it is easy for me? For your mother? Easy for Amir?”

  We were standing in the arch between the lounge and the dining area and my gaze drifted to the table, where Amir had put an old poster frame. He’d been printing out pictures and digging out photos from albums and frames to arrange inside. A project for Kam’s room at the Rec. A room I’d not seen, but Amir had visited without difficulty the day before.

  It did seem easy for Amir.

  But Dad hadn’t finished. “And what about Kamran, do you not think it is harder for him than for any of us?”

  I couldn’t even look at him when he said that, shame stinging me to tears.

  All evening I worried about it, the pressure building in my chest until something would burst and I’d start to shake so much that I’d have to put down whatever it was I was trying to concentrate on – a book, the PlayStation controller, the can I was about to sip from. What little I could stomach of my tea came right back up half an hour later.

  When Mum came up the stairs carrying the clean laundry everyone else had forgotten existed, she found me draped over the toilet seat spitting the last of my meal into the bowl.

  “Sef…” She poured cold water onto a clean flannel and laid it gently over the back of my neck.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “You’re sick.”

  I was spared the visit to the Rec. Hadn’t meant to fall asleep.

  The bang of the front door woke me up, so drunk on deep sleep that the room span as I heard the familiar double-time of Amir thumping up the stairs and into the bathroom with a slam.

  Amir’s never done anything delicately.

  Used to drive Kam mad when he’d lend Amir something that got returned in pieces…

  More stomping along the landing into the room next door and, without wanting to, I pulled myself up and out of bed. The door to our old room was wide open. In the time he’d had it to himself, Amir had set about redoing the place in the style of the local tip.

  “How was your visit?” I asked from the landing, not wanting to go any further in case some tentacled beast lurked beneath the layer of crap on the floor.

  Amir ignored me, yanking the cupboard open to look for something.

  “How’s Kam?”

  Amir’s jaw tightened. “Like you care.”

  I sighed and went into my room, picking up a script from where it had slid onto the floor. I read the title – A View from the Bridge – and put it down.

  “Why haven’t you seen him?” Amir had followed me as far as the door, not able to set foot in the room he still felt was Kam’s.

  “I have.” I don’t even know why I said it.

  “Don’t lie. I heard Dad talking.” Of course he had. “You’re not really sick – so why didn’t you come today?”

  “I can’t explain…”

  “Try!” he shouted.

  “Why? What good’s an explanation going to do anyone?”

  “Then just go and visit.”

  “I can’t!” I felt trapped. “I tried… It – I couldn’t…” That all-consuming fear reached out from my memory, the lift doors opening, the sound of wheels on lino, Mum walking out…

  “He’s your brother, doesn’t that mean anything?” Amir was yelling louder now and someone downstairs had opened the lounge door – “What’s going on up there?” – but Amir didn’t notice. “Why are you being so selfish?”

  I stepped over to move him out of the doorway so I could shut the door, shut out the noise, but Amir reacted like I was coming for him and swung for my face.

  It wasn’t hard to block.

  “Fucking hell, Amir! Don’t be a dick.”

  “You’re the dick!” And he lunged at me.

  “Amir!” I wrestled to pin his arms to his sides. “Chill out, will you?”

  He was squirming, angry as a pit bull with a bag on its head, jackknifing his body so that I lost my grip and he brought his head back, smacking me on the chin and knocking me loose. The scrawny little shit piled into me, scrapping and slapping.

  “Why won’t you see him? Why are you such a coward?”

  Someone was coming up the stairs.

  “Tell me!”

  I couldn’t talk, wouldn’t fight back, just let myself be pushed to the floor, taking all the flailing, the smacks to my head and chest and arms.

  “He’s family!” Smack, punch, kick. “GO AND SEE HIM.”

  “I can’t,” I whispered.

  “WHY NOT?” Amir screeched in my face, spit flying out of his mouth and onto my glasses.

  But Dad was there, pulling o
ff my sobbing, struggling little brother, his face webbed with snot.

  “It should have been you!”

  “Amir!” Dad looked horrified and glanced to where Mum was on the landing, mouth open in shock. “That’s enough.”

  Our parents bundled him away from me and into his room to calm down as I curled up tighter against the corner of my bed.

  It should have been you.

  CHAPTER 5

  I couldn’t be in the house the next day, but I’d lost shifts when Kam was in hospital. Brian was still covering my Sundays, and for all Finn would have had me round, I needed to be somewhere I wouldn’t have to explain myself. So I messaged Uncle Danish – and because he’s my Uncle D, he came to my rescue without question. Took me driving and spent the whole time discussing my technique, the traffic, his caravan, the job he was supposed to leave for that would take him away for the next six months.

  “Do you have to go?” I glanced over at him, the car wobbling slightly.

  “Relax your shoulders, Sef. Take the first exit at the roundabout,” he said as I slowed to join the queue, indicator ticking. We drove on for a bit longer, until Uncle D directed me to an empty enough road, where we practised manoeuvres.

  My turn in the road was near perfect.

  “Beginner’s luck,” Uncle D teased as we pulled over to the kerb for a rest. “When is your test?”

  “Seventeenth of October.” A month away. “Think I’ll pass?”

  “You’re better than your brother was.” He faltered. “At this stage, I mean.”

  No one likes to talk about Kam in the past tense.

  Uncle D took his wallet out of his back pocket, opening up the creased brown leather. “I was going to do this with a little more ceremony, but…” He handed me about eighty quid in twenties. “Book yourself some lessons the week before your test. Make sure you pass.”

  Kam had taken his twice and it felt wrong to want to beat him, but I accepted the money and thanked my uncle.