Chapter Seven: There is A Light That Never Goes Out

‘He’s joined one of those internet cults.’
Mum circled the kitchen, stopped at the oven, hovered by the door for a moment as if she was just about to open it, then moved back towards the fridge. She picked a postcard off the floor and attached it to the door with a magnet. Then walked back to the oven, opened the door and peered inside as if George was curled up on the roasting tray playing Tomb Raider Legend.
‘They’ve talked him into killing himself. We’ll never find him!’ she said slamming the oven door shut.
‘Oh God, he doesn’t even know how to make himself breakfast!’
‘Of course he hasn’t killed himself. It’s just like before, he’s craving attention,’ I said.
George had always enjoyed pretending to be dead. As a child he’d lie face down in the front room, arms outstretched, holding his breath. Or when we went away on holiday he’d hang suspended in the pool with his curly blonde hair fanning out round his head and his arms floating limply by his sides. We ignored it after a while. Or had that been me? Perhaps George had a point, perhaps he was right to crave attention.
‘I need a smoke,’ Mum said her hands shaking as she gripped the back of the chair.
‘But you quit years ago. Don’t start again,’ I pleaded.
‘I wish I was dead. I never should have suggested that he became a driving instructor,’ she said her cheeks burning.
I handed her a fag and watched as she bent over the hob, her red hair almost catching the flame. She stood upright with the cigarette wedged between her thumb and forefinger like she was a prisoner on her exercise break.
‘How did his first driving lesson go?’ I asked.
‘It was a complete disaster,’ she said walking back round the table, her body sagging as she smoked, ‘He came home half an hour early, slammed the bedroom door in my face and didn’t appear again for twenty four hours. I tried talking to him but he just said he was ‘never getting in that shit-box again.’’
I picked up the note, still lying on the table. It had been roughly three days since Mum had found it.

There is a light that never goes out.
Except sometimes it does.
Farewell.
George
X

‘It’s ridiculous, he doesn’t even like The Smiths, they aren’t even his generation. If you’re going to write a suicide note, at least use some sort of relevant reference point,’ I said.
George always pretended he liked the coolest music, music from my generation - MY MUSIC. It got on my nerves, kids these days thought they could dip into any musical style they fancied, just skirting along the surface like music was just a boating lake that you went fishing on and then threw stuff back in when you were done. Never understanding its significance because you’d never witnessed it first hand.
Oh God I was ancient.
‘What haven’t I done? What must I do? Who must I ring?’ Mum said starting pacing again.
She was behaving like a lunatic.
‘Have you tried all his friends?’
‘Yes.’
‘Checked to see if he’s taken his passport?’
‘It’s still there.’
‘What about Gran?’
‘I checked but he’s not there. I couldn’t let on that he’d gone missing. She’d worry herself silly. Then I was on the phone for hours and she was going on about how nobody talks in the retirement home and they’re all zombies and all they do is whisper behind her back and don’t tell her what time the Bingo’s starting. Oh god it’s hopeless.’
I stood up, took the remnants of the cigarette from Mum’s fingers and chucked it into the kitchen sink.
‘Why don’t you get some sleep? It’s two in the morning. I’ll have another look in his room. See if there’s any clues. I’ll wake you the minute something happens.’
Mum’s face folded in two like a piece of bad origami. Her shoulders sagged and her nose practically brushed against the stone tiles. She poured herself a large glass of gin, added a capful of tonic, then walked up the stairs, her slippers thumping on the carpet like they were made of lead.

Didn’t George realise Mum was worried sick? Three days might not seem like that much to most people, certainly not for a nineteen year old but George didn’t feel nineteen. And he had the characteristic ‘knowing naivety’ that his generation were cursed with. He’d ‘been there, done that’ but still needed a lift home once he’d finished. In my day we’d been lucky to get a clip round the back of the head and a bubble perm. I’d worked in a green grocers in Honor Oak Park for five pound a day. FIVE POUND! I hadn’t had time to feel sorry for myself. And I’m bloody sure I didn’t spend all my weekend plugged into a computer screen, bashing away at the controls like some demented puppet, pretending I was a soldier in Baghdad shooting everything that moved, eyes bulging, neck veins dancing, unable to tear myself away, so desperate for a wee that I resorted to peeing into an empty Coke can next to the bed. Actually this was exactly what I needed to do. If I tried hard enough perhaps I could think my way back into George’s brain, remember exactly how I’d felt when I was his age. What was it called? The stuff they’d experimented with during the Cold War. Remote viewing?

In fact George’s room looked pretty much the same as my teenage abode. The only differences were the accessories – after Mum’s mothball FM radio I’d saved up and bought the biggest ghetto blaster on the planet. I’d had stacks of compilation tapes, some that I’d trade with friends, illegible biro scrawled on the track list, exclamation marks signalling a really brilliant song or others I’d make for myself, recording Capital Radio or when I got more experimental and into rave music, the pirate radio station that broadcast from a tower block somewhere in Anerley. And of course the clothing lying on the floor had been more lurid, there’d been a lot of Lycra back then, everything very tight and shiny, not big, baggy trousers that hung from your crotch. And of course the TV had only four stations and youth programmes which were shown as a treat on Sundays where everything was shot at a right angle and the presenters wore black rimmed glasses and enormous deck chairs shoved down the backs of their jackets. My world had been relatively narrow. Whilst George could access everything. Sitting with his can of pee next to him he could talk to anyone anywhere in the world. Perhaps Mum was right. Perhaps he had joined a cult. There was only one thing for it. I’d have to look at his internet browsing history.

There are some things you should never find out about your brother. Of course I knew he watched porn. All men watch porn. But I’d had no idea what kind of porn, in fact I’d had no idea such porn existed. I was a veritable librarian. I thought blow jobs represented the height of feminine skills! No wonder I’d had no success with Medium Brown. These women WORKED! They toiled in the world of sex, sweat pouring from their brows, their bodies slick with effort, seamlessly forming themselves into one shape after another, their mouths here, here and there all at the same time. Sighing, groaning, talking dirt – the moment the T-shirt was pulled up over the head, the work commenced. And they were so flexible. And yet their giant breasts never moved and they had waists so small that a man could clasp his hands right around as he bore down on top working and working and working, uttering crazy, ugly, frightening words. No wonder George was depressed. It was all so much effort. It made sex a monumental mission, for a newcomer it would seem impossibly intimidating. Oh for the innocent days of dry humping! In fact after ten minutes of watching four men standing in a circle furiously ejaculating all over a woman’s head (trying to stop myself from thinking how those sperm could have been recruited for a much more useful cause), I felt like running away with George, somewhere where there was no internet connection and everyone wore thick, wholesome clothing and read good, edifying books. With the odd dry hump now and then to liven things up. It’s not that I’m a puritan; I fully believe love and sex don’t have to go hand in hand. In fact my mission was all about love and sex being two completely separate things. But sex was fun. Why take it so seriously? And aside from a couple of gaming sites, that was the sum of George’s internet activity. He hadn’t been looking for jobs. He hadn’t been looking at courses for next year. At least he was consistent. Of course Mum would have no idea about the porn and I wouldn’t tell her. It would only confirm her impression that the internet was a bad place, ruled by lawless mafia with the core objective of stealing money and sanity from her precious children.

I looked around. A skateboard stood in the corner. A marijuana-smoking alien smiled out from over the fire place. He hadn’t done anything stupid had he? Then surrounded by the odour of teenage angst, it all came flooding back. My own past. Who was I kidding? I’d had to DRAG myself to that job at the grocers. Every single day had been a struggle. I could remember being so down some days that I couldn’t even get a brush through my hair - I’d do half my head and then leave the other half for the next day. I could barely garner enough energy in my neck to raise my head up off of the pillow. It was like lifting a bag of cement just finding a pair of matching socks. Dad had begged me to stay at college, not to drop out. Every morning he’d stood at the bottom of my bed, tickling my feet, then pulling the duvet off, pulling the curtains open, pouring coffee on my head, anything to get me up and outside. He’d understood that once I was standing up things became easier. Perhaps it distributed the blood better. Then he’d wrestle me into college each day. Sometimes I was so confused I couldn’t even remember him driving me there; one day I actually discovered in my History class that I still had my pyjama bottoms on. That was how little I cared about standing up and doing stuff. Then when I got home I played The Smiths and had just enough energy to change it over to the other side and The Cure and I switched from one to the other, sipping tea, smoking, staring into a bottomless abyss. Every day the same. Mum’s got a photo of me from that period. I’m sitting on a train, on the way to visit Gran in Dorset, the corners of my mouth sag at the corners, there are dark circles under my eyes, I remember Mum trying to make me smile by pulling an exaggerated sulky face but I couldn’t move my face. I was on a conveyer belt of low mood and I couldn’t get off. What if George had exactly the same thing? I started to panic. What if George had really done it?

I must have fallen asleep because when I opened my eyes, I was lying in an awkward position, sideways across the grey beanbag, the same beanbag I’d listened to music on, had stared into space on, the same one that George no doubt had made a terrible decision to end his life before it had even started properly. God he annoyed the hell out of me most of the time. He was like an empty vessel but then sometimes there’d be nights like that one a few weeks back when we’d sit in the garden and smoke and laugh and there’d be no divide. My stomach started to ache, I moved to my side and cradled my eggs with the palm of my hand over my stomach. ‘Not long now,’ I whispered to make myself (and them) feel better. I felt them shift ever so slightly. Then I remembered when George had been about three, he’d had this toy donkey and whenever you spoke to him you had to speak to the donkey first, his name was Ernest or something and it drove me mad, I mean I was this depressed teenager at the time and talking to one person was hard work, let alone a child and its stupid, stuffed donkey. But those were the odd occasions when I actually felt better, I’d find myself asking this dumb donkey questions like ‘What kind of weather is it going to be today Ernest?’ or ‘What is your favourite colour?’ and George was hopeless at being a ventriloquist, he could barely talk anyway so he would just mumble in a low voice and move Ernest’s head from side to side. And it was such a hopeless double act that I’d start laughing and just the tiniest of laughs was enough to dine out on for quite some time. Then I thought about having to dig that donkey out from the box in the attic and that would be my favourite memory of my brother and it would have to go alongside my Dad’s cricket jumper which I kept folded up at the bottom of my wardrobe.

When I started to cry it actually felt like a relief; the anxiety ebbed away into the bean bag and I was floating on a sea of baggy trousers, tennis socks and Lynx aftershave and my brother was floating next to me with Ernest nodding his head from side to side, mumbling and I must have fallen asleep because when I woke up George was standing over me. I shook my head, convinced I was hallucinating, the sun filtering through the metallic blinds and refracting through a crystal Mum had hung from the window ledge. George was bathed in technicolor.
‘You were snoring your head off,’ he said.
I struggled to get up but the bean bag was too soft and he had to help me to my feet.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ I said.
‘I went for a walk,’ he said sullenly.
I checked his eyes for signs of drug taking but they just looked tired. He stood like a lump of wood, a carving of a teenage hoodlum. Then he slumped onto the corner of the bed.
‘I’m knackered,’ he said.
‘Oh no, you’re not sleeping. You have some explaining to do.’
Running from the bedroom, I galloped up two at a time, ‘Mum, Mum’ I shouted, almost knocking one of the cats flying as I caught it with the side of my foot. Mum was standing outside her room, she looked like she’d just come out of ECT therapy. Her hair standing on end, her eyes hooded with sleep, the terrible, droopy T-shirt that she always wore with the picture of Che Guevara on the front, just about covering her dignity.
‘He’s downstairs,’ I said.

George said nothing about where he had been, what he had seen, why he’d run away or what the note meant. By the time Mum got downstairs, he’d pulled off his stinky trainers and was asleep across his bed, still fully dressed. Then we’ d sat quietly in the kitchen, waiting for some sort of explanation, eventually we’d gone upstairs and gone to bed. I hadn’t slept in Mum’s bed since the week that Dad died.

I dreamt about eggs and brothers. Brothers inside of eggs. Family. Family and loss. Spongy fingers waving eggs goodbye. Welcoming fingers on the other side. Family. Loss. The dreams whirled around. When I awoke the second time I was curled around my mother. My legs hitched up so they mirrored the shape of hers.
‘I’m so happy I’ve got you both,’ Mum said into the pillow.
And in that moment I wanted to tell her that soon there would be four of us. Okay perhaps it had been more complicated than I thought. And perhaps this thing with George required serious consideration; I couldn’t just start my new family without helping out my current one.

So the plan became a tree with branches; one branch for my baby, one branch my brother, the third my mother.

Enough to be getting on with then.